My first lesson in brown whiskey came forty-odd years ago, in a time of bad sideburns and slick leisure suits and eight-track troubadours. I seem to remember Tanya Tucker calling to me from the dashboard, and the Alabama sun burning through the open window of my metal-flake-brown Pontiac Grand Prix. I was a newspaper guy then, on my way to a story I can no longer recall. The Pontiac liked to run hot, but I made it all the way to the middle of nowhere before it finally blew a radiator hose and died in the ditch. I stepped out into a green-gray cloud of scalding steam, cursing all the Pontiacs that Michigan ever made. ¶ I looked north, then south. Nothing. The closest garage or parts house was twenty miles away, and I couldn’t remember the last farmhouse or mobile home I had seen. I waited twenty minutes before I saw a car, then, five minutes later, another; they didn’t even slow down. I threw my necktie into the back seat—I did not want to die in a clip-on—and started walking. The asphalt shimmered in front of me, bottle caps tamped down into the soft tar. ¶ I didn’t really notice the truck, an ancient Ford, till it rolled up beside me. An old man in overalls and a begrimed undershirt, one knobby elbow out the window, looked me up and down.
I was a country boy myself, or
