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

B & L BEER

My high school classmates acknowledged that Richard Baldinger was a genius. To enter the realm of his basement lab was proof. Rather than the expected hammers, wrenches, and saws, Rich’s workbench 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. My high school chemistry project was to polymerize a plastic, Bakelite. I made that gray ball in Rich’s basement lab.

Rich 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 hid the resulting case of quarts in the cedar closet in the attic. It was also a storage space for unused clothing, such as Mrs. Baldinger’s mink stole.

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. Rich heard his father mumbling and getting out of bed to find the source of all the noise. While his father tramped around downstairs checking for intruders, Rich lay in bed watching foam seep through the ceiling and run down the wall of his bedroom, which was located under the cedar closet.

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 stole with beer and shards of glass. 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. To prevent further explosions, Professor Baldinger placed the confiscated beer in the refrigerator.

On one particularly hot afternoon, Wallace returned home from work at 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 in the 1950s, 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 from her beer, she would respect the rules. One dot meant she would willingly hold his hand. Two dots mean she will give him a kiss. You know, or at least can imagine, what 3 and 4 dots would suggest. The most that any of my dates would give up, at seeing four dots, was a coy giggle.