Tequila Mockingbird (7 page)

2 ounces pisco

1 (12-ounce) can cola

Pour the pisco over ice in a highball glass and fill to the top with the cola. These go down so quick, you could end up half naked and quacking on the quad.

M
ary Shelley created more than a monster when she anonymously published
Frankenstein
at age twenty-one—she also birthed one of pop culture's greatest misattributions: Frankenstein is the name of the whacko doctor,
not
the green-faced, peg-necked creature. (He gets his own nicknames, including “vile insect” and “wretched devil,” courtesy of his dear old dad.) Experiment with the following Halloween-ready, bright green concoction. Heads up: more than a few couples have played their own version of doctor after downing more than a few of these.

1 ounce melon liqueur

1 ounce tequila

1 (12-ounce) can club soda

Pour the liqueur and tequila over ice in a highball glass, then fill to the top with the club soda. Now, light a few candles, lock the door, and guard your potion with monosyllabic grunts.

C
onceived to exploit the success of the author's earlier, blatantly comic
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn
emerged as a stand-alone classic. In folksy first person, Huck recounts river-boat escapades, narrow escapes, and occasional cross-dressing, set against a Mississippi River raging with racial strife. Mark Twain—a pen name riff on safety measurements used for steamboats—intended the book as an excoriating critique of slavery, but to this day it remains banned in some libraries across our lands, with parents and teachers crying (irony alert!) racism. Drink the tension away with a bittersweet tribute to Huck's pap, a daylight drunk who could've used a good education.

5 fresh blueberries, washed

2 ounces berry-flavored vodka (like 44° North Mountain Huckleberry Flavored Vodka)

1 (12-ounce) can club soda

Muddle the blueberries in the bottom of a mason jar. Add ice and pour in the vodka, filling to the top with the club soda. Enjoy the sunset—but stay alert for riverbank beverage bandits.

I
f you suffer from debilitating back pain, odds are you either exercise incorrectly, don't exercise at all, or once tried to get through
Atlas Shrugged
. Ayn Rand's heavier-than-a-toddler dystopian novel, in which much of the general public turns against mounting government regulations, remains a controversial slog today. Why not match this big boy with a similarly shifty ingredient: absinthe. Legendary for its rumored hallucinogenic effects, absinthe was banned in the U.S.A. in 1962, but recently reemerged as a kind of lovingly legal lighter fluid. Enjoy this debatable beverage tucked into your bunker with that aching back (and hulking book), hiding from the rest of society.

1 ounce absinthe

1 sugar cube

Pour the absinthe into a rocks glass, lay a butter knife across the rim, and balance the sugar cube on top. Slowly run three to four ounces of ice-cold water over the cube and into the rocks glass, allowing the mixture to cloud. Remove the knife, retreat to the basement, and sip to your conspiracy theorist's content.

A
lexandre Dumas knew a thing or two about keeping an audience tuned in. Heck, he knew a thing or
eighteen
, because that's how many newspaper installments it took to tell
The Count of Monte Cristo
, which still sets the bar for archetypical revenge tales. You know the protagonist's formula: (1) Get wrongfully convicted; (2) Go to jail; (3) Get out and get even. Oh yeah, and (4) Get
rich
along the way—the kind of rich that can fill a Jacuzzi with Champagne. Turn the bubbles up high and hop into our sweet-as-vengeance Cristal cocktail. Be warned: it could take prison-worthy deeds to snag the really pricey stuff.

1 ounce elderflower liqueur (like St-Germain)

Champagne (like Cristal), to fill

Pour the liqueur into your fanciest flute and top with the best bubbly you can buy. (And if you
can
afford Cristal? Lose the liqueur, double the good stuff, and—hold up—can you spot a dude a fifty?)

T
his one'll make you think twice about flushing a goldfish down your toilet. In Melville's
Moby-Dick
, published first in England (and greeted with scathing reviews!), the titular whale is best known for attacking Captain Ahab's ship and then—talk about special skills—chewing off the poor fella's leg. Ahab spends the rest of his career limping around, determined to exact revenge on Moby-D, only to finally spear the whale and—Plan B!—get dragged underwater to his own ironic death. Our sea-inspired cocktail is as blue as the Pacific, but the real fun is in playing fish hunter. Grab a harpoon and get even.

1 ounce vodka

½ ounce Blue Curaçao

1 (12-ounce) can lemon-lime soda

1 Swedish Fish candy, for garnish

Combine the vodka and Blue Curaçao over ice in a highball glass and fill to the top with the lemon-lime soda. Now for the demonic part: grab that Swedish Fish by the gills, spear it with a swizzle stick, and get plunging. Just don't fall in yourself.

Y
our grandparents knew
Gulliver's Travels
as a morality tale wrapped in droll travelogue: an Englishman lost at sea stumbles upon a handful of bizarre lands in which he is by turns the biggest and the smallest creature for miles, leading him to question everything from patriotism to religion to his very definition of home.
You
know
Gulliver's Travels
as the critically panned, audience-ignored film that featured Jack Black putting out a fire by peeing on it (hope you took off the 3-D glasses for that part). In our beachy keen nod to the hero washed ashore, choose your own adventure with a Lilliputian shooter or Brobdingnagian cocktail. Try saying
that
three times drunk.

½ ounce vodka

½ ounce peach schnapps

½ ounce grapefruit juice

½ ounce cranberry juice

Shake the ingredients with ice and strain into an empty rocks glass; this goes down in a single swig. For the bigger, Brobdingnagian variation on the above, double all ingredients, shake with ice, and strain into a cocktail glass. Little seasick? Eyes on the horizon, sailor.

O
riginally handwritten on piles of paper,
A Confederacy of Dunces
found life only after its author lost his own; John Kennedy Toole committed suicide, his mother found those secret pages, and she began hawking the thing around their home state of Louisiana, claiming it was the next great American novel. (Sorry, guys: sometimes moms are right.) Now a universally adored Pulitzer-winner starring a brilliant New Orleans nut with a heart of odd, this classic goes best with another: the Big Easy's own Sazerac. Raise a glass to the tragically shortchanged Toole—and everything else he might have written.

½ ounce anise liqueur (like Herbsaint)

1½ ounces rye whiskey

1 teaspoon sugar

3 dashes Peychaud's bitters

2 dashes Angostura bitters

Lemon twist, for garnish

Pour the liqueur into a chilled rocks glass, swirl around till the sides are nice and coated, and then toss anything that doesn't stick. Add the remaining ingredients to a shaker with ice, shake well, and strain into the glass. Guests? Lemon twist garnish. No guests? Cut the cute and get reading.

L
ong before the universally adored film came out,
The Last of the Mohicans
was landmark (if historically wobbly) literature. Chronicling the tomahawk-assisted turf wars of Native Americans, Cooper stuffed his pages with wordy, witless plot-stoppers: “Duncan wandered among the lodges, unquestioned and unnoticed, endeavoring to find some trace of her in whose behalf he incurred the risk he ran,” anyone? Anyone? We'll help you through the slow parts. Take a classic mojito and launch your own sneak attack, losing the sugar for agave nectar and adding a few authentically Native American fruits to the party. The result could stop wars.