You will find short stories on this site. Most are autobiographical. Some are fiction.

B & L BEER

My high school classmates knew Richard Baldinger was a genius. To enter the realm of his basement lab was proof. Rather than the expected hammers, wrenches, and saws, on his workbench, Rich’s had flasks, a Bunsen burner, and lab scales. On the shelf above the bench were jars of chemicals. His understanding of chemistry was awe-inspiring to me.

In the Winter of his 15th year, he brewed a batch of beer. Considering the pervasive smell of fermenting beer, it is difficult to imagine how Rich kept this secret from his parents, I suspect that he hid the brew in their rickety junk-filled garage. Once bottled, Rich decided to put the resulting case of bottles in the cedar closet in the attic above his bedroom. It was also a storage space for unused clothing such as Mrs. Baldinger’s mink coat.

On a sultry night, the following August, Rich was reminded of his case of beer in the cedar closet when he and his parents were awakened by loud and rapidly repeating popping sounds. As Rich lay in his bed, he heard his father mumbling as he got out of bed to find the source of all the noise. As his father tramped around downstairs checking for intruders, Rich lay in bed watching foam seep through his ceiling and run down the wall of his bedroom.

The revered art history professor, Wallace Baldinger, rarely displayed any emotions, and never agitation, but this was an exception. The exploding beer had riddled the walls of the cedar closet, and the mink coat, with shards of glass and beer. Rich didn’t tell me of the punishment he received other than a whole lot of cleaning and loss of the unexploded bottles of beer. Those his father confiscated. In order to prevent further explosions Professor Baldinger placed the confiscated beer in the refrigerator.

On one particularly hot afternoon, Wallace returned home from work in his Oriental Art Museum. He looked in the refrigerator for a Coke or orange juice. But the only beverage there were the remaining bottles of Rich’s beer. He tried it and found it to be quite good. Subsequently, Rich was given permission to make beer in the basement, so long as Wallace could have a share of the product.

Rich and I were neighbors and friends. He told me this story and we decided to make beer together. We called it B&L Beer and painted that name onto each of the bottles we produced. We also painted four dots on each bottle. If you are from the Northwest Coast, you may remember that on the back of each Olympia beer label was the bottling date and one to four dots, indicating the bottling line on which it was produced. The hope of every high school boy was that when his date removed the label on her beer she would respect the rules. One dot meant she would willingly hold his hand. Two dots means she will give him a kiss. You know, or at least can imagine, what 3 and 4 dots would suggest. But it was the 1950s and the most any of my dates would give up, at seeing those four dots, was a coy giggle.