It happens to all of us at one time or another. Usually it happens to me. But not long ago it happened to my wife.
Oh, happy days.
We were at a concert on a recent Saturday night. It was being held in a giant tent, and attached to the tent was a beer and wine garden. My wife thought a nice glass of red wine would go well with some great rhythm and blues.
So I went off to the wine bar and asked for a glass of red. The fellow behind the bar pulled out a plastic beer cup and proceeded to pour three fingers of his finest plonk.
Now, I don't drink wine, don't enjoy it, don't know much about it, but I am going to go out on a limb here: if you're being served wine into a beer cup from a bottle with a screw top, you're not exactly getting the finest vintages from France. Or California. Or, say, Taiwan.
No, this was not gourmet wine. More an industrial grade, perhaps one short evolutionary step up from cooking wine or, really, grape juice left out in the sun. But whatever, it was the wine that was on tap, so I handed my wife the beer cup only a little apologetically and the band started playing.
After the first set she waggled the cup at me, which is our cute married way of saying, "Oh, no, evidently my legs are broken and I am incapable of getting up to get my own (bad word) wine. So off you go." Suppressing the growl I felt rising in my throat, off I went., and returned with some more Chateau du Varsol, which she proceeded to down with considerable gusto, probably for fear of leaving it to melt through the plastic cup.
Partway through the second set the band was in a funky groove, and we got up to dance. The dance area was directly in front of the speakers, so there wasn't much point in talking. But such niceties as having a point have never stood in the way of my wife's urge to chat, and she leaned in to say something.
Dear Lord.
I'm going to blame the wine for this. In my life, I have only once ever smelled breath that bad, and it also came from someone drinking bad wine. In that case, the wine was in a brown bag and he was drinking straight from the bottle, but we were not far away from that here.
Her breath was bad. Breathtakingly bad. Except sadly, it didn't take her breath away. And since she was utterly oblivious to the vile smell coming out from between her front teeth.
I recoiled, and her eyes widened. "What?" I smelled her say.
"It's your breath," I shouted back, just as the song ended. "It's awful. Like what I imagine it would be like to stick your head into a dead monkey's colon. You may want to have a piece of gum. Or a mint. Or a cup of bleach."
She leaned forward to reply, and I just bailed out. I said, "No!" and put my hand between her mouth and my nose.
She knocked it away. "Find me some gum!" she commanded. Someone has to have gum. Everybody has gum." Well, except for you, dear, the one person who doesn't have anything to cover up the stench of rotting carcasses emanating from within her.
"Come with me," I said. And she did.
I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed the time it took us to find some gum for her.
"Do you happen to have any gum?" I would say to complete strangers. "This is my wife and her breath has just been declared a Global Environmental Disaster by the United Nations. As for the gum, it doesn't matter whether it's sugarless or not, doesn't matter if you just scraped it off your shoe, just get it to us before things reach a critical mass and cause climate change."
We finally ( far too soon, for me) encountered a friend with gum, and the problem more or less resolved itself.
But I owned those moments. Oh, I will pay for them, sure. But it was nice to come out on top for once.
Thank you, bad wine.
Nils Ling's book "Truths and Half Truths" is a collection of some of his most memorable and hilarious columns. To order your copy, send a cheque or money order for $25.00 (taxes, postage and handling included) to RR #9, 747 Brackley Point Road, Nils Ling
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