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| Just a few of the many Michigan craft beer brands |
I saw
a submissions call for stories about beer. I am a beer drinker, and the
city I live in, Grand Rapids, Michigan, once tied with Charlotte, North Carolina,
for the award of Best Beer City in the United States. Our town is filled with breweries, and the local brews are marvelously good. So when I saw the call for
papers on beer, I wanted to contribute to the anthology. How could I come
up with a unique story on the drink that is so much a part of American
culture? The answer came from Mexico.
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| Pulque |
I had seen references
to a type of Mexican beer called pulque,
made of the fermented sap of the maguey plant (better known to
English-speakers as agave). I had read about it, wanted to try it, but could not find it.
Some research revealed that it was popular in Mexico, where one could find pulque bars, but the drink was difficult
to find outside that nation because transporting or canning it purportedly
ruined the flavor. Most pulque bars
were local, so the industry had not gone international. I asked my
daughter, who had lived and taught four years in Mexico, about the drink: "Pulque
is nasty," she told me. I guess it's an acquired taste.
But
the Mexican connection gave me an idea for a story.
A
local epicure and chef named Phil Ochs (he is distantly related to the late
folk singer by the same name) writes and gives seminars on cooking with beer. His
title is The Beervangelist. He is locally famous and makes a living by writing
a column on cooking with beer, appearing on TV, and giving seminars where he
teaches recipes using various brews. He has dreams of making it big and landing
a TV show—becoming "a
beer-cooking Rachel Ray or Emeril Lagasse." When he hears that a pulque bar, La Casa Pulque, with the curious subtitle Recuerdos del Futuro (Remembrance of the Future), has opened up, he
contacts the owner, Maya Perez , who invites to organize a cooking seminar there
and to come and meet her and taste pulque.
He visits on a snowy night.
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| Aztec pyramid in Choulula, Mexico |
Maya shows him
around and gives him glasses of pulque to
taste. After the tour, and when he has drunk several glasses, a man shows up
and threatens her. He steps forward in her defense and, when he is gone, asks her who he is and if he
is a gang leader. He is, she says, and tells him to be careful, he might pull of
knife the next time. Phil tells her he grew up in a rough neighborhood and knows how to fight with a knife. When the bar closes, she invites him to her place.
Her place is a portal that transports them back in time. Maya tells him they are in the ancient city
of Choulula, Mexico, and identifies herself: “I am Mayahuel. I am a goddess—the
goddess of rising, swelling, fermentation and of pulque.”
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| Depiction of Mayahuel |
She authenticates
her goddess-hood and also convinces him, by making love to him Aztec-style,
that he is not mad. She explains that she has gotten on the wrong side of
Mixtotl, the man who threatened her, who is in fact a god, because she has refused to participate in
the festival dedicated to him, in which a man and a woman are sacrificed. The
man, the woman, and the priest who performs the sacrifice must be drunk on pulque (a historical fact I discovered
doing research). Not an Aztec but a Mayan goddess, the ritual sickens her. She
has escaped to the future to avoid her part in it (and by doing so to bring it
to an end). Mixtotl has come for her and insisted she return to ancient times
and play her part in the sacrifice. She has chosen Phil as her champion. He
must defeat Mixtotl to free Maya and to end the ceremony.
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| Mayahuel, contemporary depiction |
Supernatural stories always contain a
charmed object. Maya gives Phil a knife given to her by Raugutiene, the Baltic
goddess of beer and fermentation (Maya knows all the gods and goddesses of
brewing), with whom she took refuge when she first escaped Mexico. It not only
cuts; every cut creates a certain amount of drunkenness in one's opponent. Phil
is encouraged but also knows that ancient gods were skillful warriors with
supernatural powers. It would not be an easy fight.
He has discovered,
in fighting with gang members in his old neighborhood, that they often went
through a set of ritual moves before fighting. He won knife several fights by
attacking them when they were going through their preliminary "dance." Sure enough, Mixtotl, begins a dance to begin the fight. While he is doing it, Phil gets a good
cut on him. Using the skills learned on mean streets, he is able to disable
Mixtotl—though the spell of the knife helps greatly. With victory, he wins
freedom for Maya. The human sacrifices will end. Mixtotl will not be
worshiped. And she can return to the future to run her bar—and to explore a
relationship with her new-found mortal lover.
The story appeared
in an anthology, Six-Pack of Stories. It is available in print. Get a copy here.
For more good reads, see my Writer's Page.
I would love to hear your comments.
Soon, a sequel to my vampire novel, Sinfonia: The First Notes on the Lute, will be released. It is titled Sinfonia: A Painted House. Stay tuned.
Happy reading.
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