A cocktail from Inherent Vice brought us what is by far the most read post on this site: the tequila zombie. I’m not sure exactly why that one pulls in the hits so much more effectively than anything else around here. It certainly isn’t the wildest or most iconic drink we’ve tackled (see banana breakfast, kumis, Gwenhidwy’s drink, the English candy drill trilogy, etc, etc, etc). But some confluence of factors from the book, the PTA film, and the fact that the drink sounds like a real cocktail but isn’t really much made, keeps it on top of the drunkpynchon.com charts even now, more than eight years drunk. Perhaps this one will get the clicks raining down again: it’s our first cocktail from Inherent Vice since the zombie!

Chapter 14 finds Doc snooping around with Tito at the Kismet, a dump of a casino languishing in North Las Vegas, “disintegrating, ghostly, huge”:

Grill cooks, tire salesmen, house framers, eye doctors, stickmen and change girls and other black-and-whites off shift from ritzier rooms where they weren’t allowed to play, old horsemen fallen on faster and more crowded times, their feelings of custody now transferred to F-100s and Chevy Apaches, were ranged sparsely in the softly shadowed light, weaving in place as if trying to stay alert. Drinks here weren’t free, but by way of real-life neighborhood civility they were cheap enough.

Doc had a grapefruit margarita and then, dropping into mental cruising gear, began to drift through the immense casino, scanning for Puck and Einar.

Inherent Vice, pp. 236 – 37.

My grapefruit margarita consists of two shots of Cuervo extra anejo (leftover from a post a few months back), one shot of Cointreau, half a shot of lime juice, and half a shot of grapefruit, plus a tajin rim for the glass.

The Cuervo extra, as well as being way too fancy for the Kismet, is really not very well suited to a margarita. But you should see the collection of half finished bottles of booze I have sitting around thanks to this project; I wasn’t buying more tequila. The richer, darker extra anejo flavours rob the margarita of some of the bright sharp quality you would get with a blanco tequila. The narrator does inform us though that everything at the Kismet is “lopsided one way or another,” so I’m figuring a margarita that isn’t perfectly balanced fits right in in that respect. (If you’re after a classic version, you want the gigantic pitcherful we made back ahead of the film release.) Nevertheless, it is pretty delicious. Not so bright, but very smooth, with the booze and acid in great balance and a nice bit of extra grapefruit depth. Thanks Doc!