Eric's Famous 151 Proof Rum Punch

I had a bachelor’s pad just north of Oklahoma City’s Taft Stadium. The little house had two fireplaces, a redwood hot tub and a wet bar. I spent thousands landscaping the hilly front yard with sandstone walkways and retainer walls, courtesy of Jakob, a master stoneworker and Israeli expatriate (another story).
As a bachelor, I always wanted my guests to enjoy themselves and I always helped them along by preparing my famous rum punch. The last time I made rum punch was at a party at my last bachelor pad.
What I had found about my rum punch is that almost no one was too discernible when it came to taste. The ingredients consisted of crushed ice, three or four cans of Hawaiian Punch and copious amounts of 151 proof rum. Hell, after the first cup you had no taste left anyway.
The last time I served my famous rum punch was a night much like tonight - cold and dreary. The guests quickly finished a bowl of punch. By the time I had concocted a second bowl, all the guests had already lost total control of their inhibitions - and their bodily movements.
My good friend Mickey left the party, tumbling headfirst down the hill to his car. Several of my friends left with other guest’s wives and girlfriends. The next day Anne said, “No more. You are never making your famous punch again. You could have gotten someone killed.”
I always listened to Anne. That day, many years ago, was the last time I ever concocted my famous punch. Will I ever make it again? Maybe, but you will have to stay the night.

Eric's Website

Cruising the Oklahoma City Concourse

In writing about life in downtown Oklahoma City during the last oil boom, I mentioned the Concourse. The Concourse was a tunnel system connecting all the major buildings in downtown OKC, originally created to provide workers with a way of avoiding the city’s weather that is often inclement. It grew into much more than just an underground pathway.

During the oil boom, the city leaders decided there was room for retail development underground. Texas Oil and Gas, the company I worked for, had offices in the Midland Center and you could enter the Concourse from a stairway on the ground floor there.

The tunnel system was simply a dimly lit concrete pathway with a colorful carpet on the floor. The system of tunnels snaked in all directions and it was easy to lose your bearings – especially if you had just visited one of the many clubs and partaken of their liquor-by-the-wink. Purchasing alcohol, at the time, was illegal anywhere except a liquor store.

Retail clothing establishments, a jewelry store, a fast food kiosk, two barbershops and other businesses soon began to thrive. Several combination restaurants occupied space in the Concourse, among them the Bull and the Bear, the Brigadoon, and the most notorious underground establishment of them all, the Depot.

The Depot was a dark saloon masquerading as a restaurant and it is true that the place sold as much booze as it did chicken fries. Its main draw was the gorgeous and friendly waitresses dressed in skimpy outfits. The drinks were strong and at any time of the day or night, half the downtown Oklahoma City oil industry congregated there.

My former business partner, John and I had an engineer. Those days preceded the age of cell phones and we began noticing music and noise in the background when Nick called in a report. We soon realized that he was reporting from his “office” in the Depot rather than one of our oil wells out in the sticks.

The Depot was dark and loud and if I told you that I had witnessed a sex act performed on an adjacent table, I wouldn't be lying. I actually saw more than one, and I imagine they were a common occurrence in some of the back corner booths.

During the oil boom of the eighties, Oklahoma City emulated the wildest of any past boomtown, and the Oklahoma City Concourse was the very epicenter of wildness.

This past oil boom saw none of the excesses of the eighties oil boom and there was no place, at least to my knowledge, as wild and crazy as the Depot. I'm glad that I experienced the boom and all its excesses while it existed. Most of all I'm glad that I survived the experience to tell about it.

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Born near Black Bayou in the little Louisiana town of Vivian, Eric Wilder grew up listening to his grandmother’s tales of politics, corruption, and ghosts that haunt the night. He now lives in Oklahoma where he continues to pen mysteries and short stories with a southern accent. He is the author of the French Quarter Mystery Series set in New Orleans and the Paranormal Cowboy Series. Please check it out on his Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iBook author pages. You might also like to check out his website.

Humping the Boonies

I once posted a list of the ten strangest things I have ever seen and quickly noticed three had occurred in Vietnam. It made me think of something else that happened in Nam that was not so much strange as it was surreal.

I was an infantry machine-gunner in the First Cavalry. I don’t know exactly where I was at the time except that it was somewhere near the Cambodian border. My company was on patrol from either Firebase Betty or Firebase Dragon Fire. I can’t remember which. The terrain was hilly and covered with thick, triple-canopy jungle. I was in Charlie Company, 1/8 Cavalry. The year was 1970.

There were a hundred men in my company and we usually hiked about a kilometer every day. This doesn’t sound like much but the temperature was always well over a hundred degrees and every man carried about a hundred pounds of food, water, ammunition and assorted paraphernalia on his back. We humped single-file, cutting our own trail through the jungle because Charlie’s trail was usually booby-trapped or an ambush waiting to happen.

We usually got an early start and made camp long before dark. The captain would then send out a patrol or two to check out our surroundings. The day that I remember, we got a very late start and were moving slowly because of the jungle’s thickness. It was late, deep shadows beginning to form beneath the green roof of vegetation that kept out most of the light at any time of day. At night, it was black as a cave.

I was walking near the rear of the single-file line. I had already stepped over a dead boa constrictor that the point man had encountered and chopped up with his machete. The man in front of me also pointed out several small green snakes hanging from the vegetation.

"Three-step snakes," he said. "They bite you, you take three steps and you’re dead."

It was then I followed the trail around a slight bend and saw perhaps the strangest and most frightening thing I had ever seen. It was a large bomb, stuck nose-first into rich jungle loam. The bomb was enormous and oh so deadly. It was so big that no one could have carried it into the jungle. It had fallen from a plane and failed to detonate. This wasn't unusual because we dropped seven million tons of bombs during the Vietnam War. Like the bomb that we'd just encountered many had never detonated

My heart was already racing from seeing the snakes. The sight of the bomb almost caused it to seize. Every man in the line passed the bomb with reverence as if it were an angry god – probably the god of war. Charlie sometimes found such bombs and wired them to explode when soldiers walked past. The thought crossed my mind during the seemingly interminable time it took to pass from its sight.

The power of that image has stuck with me now for many years and reminds me of a scene from the Planet of the Apes series. Apes have taken over the earth, the human survivors of a nuclear holocaust living in caves. During a very surreal religious ceremony, they each reveal their horrible deformities as they worship an unexploded hydrogen bomb. The remaining humans revered the bomb for the awe it imbued. After skirting a smaller though no less frightening explosive weapon in the sweltering heat of a Vietnam jungle, I understand how they felt.

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Born near Black Bayou in the little Louisiana town of Vivian, Eric Wilder grew up listening to his grandmother’s tales of politics, corruption, and ghosts that haunt the night. He now lives in Oklahoma where he continues to pen mysteries and short stories with a southern accent. He is the author of the French Quarter Mystery Series set in New Orleans and the Paranormal Cowboy Series. Please check it out on his Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iBook author pages. You might also like to check out his website.

Dancing the Wild Bamboula

There is a park in New Orleans not far from Bourbon Street. Officially, it is Beauregard Square, also known at various times during New Orleans’ past as Place Du Cirque or Place des Negres. Most locals still call it Congo Square.

Before the Civil War, wealthy New Orleans slave owners would let their slaves congregate on Sundays at a place that became known as Congo Square. There, they would sing their songs, dance their dances and practice their religion. When the West African Vodoun religion reached Jamaica, it rapidly integrated with Catholicism and many of the prevailing pagan practices of the Caribs, the native population of the Caribbean. This amalgam of beliefs known as voodoo, had offshoots often called hoodoo.

Not knowing the true meaning of the various ceremonies that took place at Congo Square, many benevolent white slave owners often participated in the drumming, and the dancing of the wild bamboula, a frenzied and sensual dance. The songs created at Congo Square were the musical seeds that sprouted, matured and grew into what we now know as jazz.

There is a cultural center located in a part of Beauregard Square, known as Louis Armstrong Memorial Park after the man that brought jazz to the world. Everyone has heard of Louis Armstrong, but few realize that his musical roots began with the rhythmic beat of West African drums and the dancing of the wild bamboula.

The Louis Armstrong Park is a must-visit. The entrance to the park, a large white arch that proclaims the name Armstrong, lies at the intersection of St. Ann and N. Rampart. The park is also close to Basin Street, made famous by both song and myth. It is also near the St. Louis Cemetery # 1 and the Iberville Project.

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Buying Beer on Sunday

While researching a story about Kansas, I came across some interesting statistics about that state’s liquor-by-the-drink laws.  It caused me to reflect on the liquor laws in the other states where I have spent time.

Kansas prohibited the sale of liquor-by-the-drink until 1987.  You could not buy a mixed drink, but there were many taverns where you could shoot pool and drink red beer (beer with tomato juice – try it, it is good) by the pitcher.  Kansas would not even let you have a mixed drink if you were flying over the state in a plane.  Airlines curtailed the sale of alcohol when in Kansas airspace.

Oklahoma was not much better when I moved here.  You had to bring your own bottle to a club, and then pay them to mix a drink for you.  If the people in the club knew you, you could get anything you wanted, a practice known as liquor-by-the-wink.  You could even get a roadie – the mixed drink of your choice in a large Styrofoam cup to tide you over on your drive home.  When Oklahomans voted to make liquor-by-the-drink legal, prices skyrocketed.  Go figure!

Nebraska has no adverse liquor laws that I know off and is one of the wildest states in which I have ever spent time.  The people there work hard, but party harder.

You would think that Texas would have the most liberal drinking laws in the country.  This is not so.  There are still dry counties, some adjacent to heavily populated areas.  Thankfully, most of the state has liquor-by-the-drink.

 

I grew up in northwest Louisiana.  I always enjoy visiting because you can literally “drive through” a liquor store and have a mixed drink passed out the window to you.  Driving with an open container is illegal; buying a mixed drink from the driver’s seat of your car is not.  Go figure!  The only other state where I have seen this practice is Georgia, but I do not know if this is still true.

As liberal as it may seem, Louisiana still has remnants of old laws.  In Oklahoma, you can buy 3.2 beer from a grocery store on Sunday - not so in Louisiana, at least north Louisiana, where there are still “blue laws” on the books. 

I married my second wife Anne in Park City, Utah.  The State owned all the liquor outlets at the time.  Maybe they still do.  My memory is dim on this matter, but it seems like you could only buy mini bottles.  Alcohol was strictly regulated but a recollection that remains vivid in my mind is going to the little cowboy’s room at a bar in Park City and seeing two young men snorting a line of cocaine on the cabinet.

Many other states still have archaic drinking laws and I am sure there are many interesting stories out there.  Please let me know if you have one, as I would like to retell it.  In the meantime, I think I will fix myself a Wild Turkey and water, and then go to bed.

Eric's Website