Alexander Chee, Tin House (via Longreads) :
My first taste of gin made me sick. I was fifteen or sixteen, and, on a night I’d been left alone, and for reasons now lost to me, I drank down a great deal of my parents’ Tanqueray. I remember specifically opening the exotic wood doors of their liquor cabinet as if it could admit me to some secret chamber of adulthood by virtue of its magic. But if gin was that sort of magic, the spell’s first price was a day and night of pain. My memory of gin for a very long time after that was a memory of nausea, a day on the couch in the living room spent with only sips from my mother’s favorite cure-all—paregoric—as I begged for the pain and unease to leave me.
Le formidable récit d’une initiation aux joies du bon martini, ingrédient essentiel des longues amitiés et des amours fidèles, qui ne manque pas de citer le « maître » Buñuel.