Drinking Soy Sauce Shots

Ah, yes, an excellent year.

Being poor and bored can lead to some crazy ways to pass the time. If you add to the mix that we didn't have TV or video games, you have a recipe for lunacy. This was especially true on cold nights in the winter when we couldn't go outside and play and it got dark early.

We came up with some bizarre games. The weirdest of all was when  we would make a little tent of tablecloths and then play under the kitchen table. We would gather a couple of bottles of the nastiest stuff we could find and set up a little bar. We would have soy sauce, lemon juice, Tabasco, pickle juice and whatever else was in the fridge or cupboard. One person would bartend and make a terrible concoction of what they thought was most repulsive. A straight soy sauce/lemon juice/hot sauce shooter, for example.

Whoever's turn it was had to drink it, which was usually done shot style, straight back and down the hatch. We liked to pretend we were slugging down hard liquor like you always see in westerns or in hard-boiled detective movies. In those shows, the guy would ask for a straight shot of something manly and then drink it, grimace and let out a tortured sigh. A sound that encompassed the unpleasantness of the booze and the relief of knowing alcohol was on the way.

We would drink up and then slam down our miserable cocktail and give our best imitation of that sigh. It got to be that we were drinking eggs and straight liquid smoke, the real hard stuff. I don't remember hitting rock bottom, but we quit, as far as I remember, cold turkey and never relapsed.