Scotch on the rocks is an easy drink to make. Just pour the scotch onto the ice, and you’re done. Mixers aren’t needed. Stirring isn’t necessary. The lack of bells and whistles means the emphasis is really put on the brand of scotch—its smoothness and maturation time both factor in—and, surprisingly, the ice. Bad ice, like some that’s been stashed in the back of a freezer from a dirty ice maker, ruins the drink. For a spirit that looks so appealing, with its amber hue, the taste is repulsive, and it gives me a visceral reaction with each sip. Even just smelling the liquor makes me shudder. I’ve tried to make myself like scotch, but each time my body rejects it. Perhaps it’s just not meant to be.
I made my first scotch on the rocks when I was five. It wasn’t for me, of course—a call to Youth and Family Services would have been warranted if that were the case. Scotch was my grandmother Mimi’s favorite alcoholic beverage. She had just returned from a six-month hospital stay battling lung cancer— and would have at least one every evening, her only rule being that it had to be after 5 p.m. The cancer left her less mobile, and with my mom attending to my newborn brother, I was tasked with making her scotch. “Tommy, can you make me a cockapoo?” she would ask me. Our kitchen always had a bottle of Johnnie Walker on the counter. Its Red Label variant—which has been the best-selling scotch since 1945—was Mimi’s drink of choice. The bottle comes in a scarlet-red box and is clad in a label of the same color, with an imprint of their logo, Browne's Striding Man, front and center.
Mimi was born in 1941, just three months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, which flung the United States into World War II. Her father voluntarily joined the Navy at 36 years old and left her mother to take care of five children during the first years of Mimi’s life. Forty years, two marriages, and subsequent divorces later, Mimi was raising five children of her own as a single mother. My mother and I moved in with Mimi months after I was born, and, with my father working on cruise ships and away from home for the majority of my life, she acted as my second parent. Mimi got stage three lung cancer in 2006 after fifty years of continual smoking and lost her insurance job from a combination of her illness and the Great Recession. She was “forced into retirement,” she would say, and, outside of special events, would not step foot outside our house.
Mimi’s retirement also came with a change in scotch; she now opted for the cheaper Dewar’s White Label—my uncle Bob would still buy her Red Label for special occasions. My initial love for making her cocktails started to fade as I grew older, and Mimi’s mobility worsened—she would rarely get off our living room couch. Her decline upset me, but as a teenager, I channeled this into resentment. I wanted to see her better, and I naively thought she was exaggerating how sick she was. The once lively grandmother, with snappy jokes and full of tales from her past, was gone—her sickness took over her personality.
This also happened to be around the time I got curious about alcohol—as any sixteen-year-old would be—and Mimi’s Dewar’s was my first sip. Naturally, I spit it out—it was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever tasted. I assumed at the time that maybe my adolescent taste buds would eventually grow to like it with age, but my family echoed the sentiment that scotch was revolting. My mom said it tastes like Band-Aids, and Bob called Mimi crazy for liking that drink. Scotch, to teenage me, was sophisticated and reminded me of the old Mimi. I would continue to go back and try it, adding soda and other mixers to mask the flavor, on a mission to make myself like this liquor. The flavor was still too strong and bitter to ignore; I felt defeated.
After sixteen years in remission, Mimi’s cancer came back in late 2022, and she was given just weeks to live. I had moved away from the Jersey Shore up to New York for school a few months earlier, and my mother broke the news to me over the phone while I was on a PATH train back to New Jersey. The news left me frozen in a sea of people packed in a rush-hour subway car. I returned home to help my mother take care of Mimi through hospice, making sure that everything went smoothly.
Those few weeks constantly replay in my mind. Each day, while my mother was at work, Mimi and I would watch “Deal or No Deal” reruns, and she was less engaged as each day passed. Externally, I acted as if nothing was wrong—desperately trying to recreate the normal times of old. On the inside, however, I was distraught. But I knew I needed to put on a strong face—to be collected and reassured when no one else in my family could.
Mimi died of heart failure in our living room on December 30th of that year, and my immediate family members came to see her passing. Her final breath came minutes after I barged through the door with boxes of takeout pizza for dinner. While everyone crowded around her, I stayed in the kitchen and listened to the sounds of her last moments—my mother turning off her humming oxygen tank stands out the most. I had every opportunity to go into the living room, see those ending moments, but I didn’t, and I do not have a reason for that decision. Screams and crying from my aunts and uncles followed shortly thereafter. I ran into the woods across the street, away from the sounds.
After the initial fallout, my family reconvined in the living room, all of us sitting across from Mimi’s now lifeless body, waiting for the coroner. Bob had brought out a bottle of Red Label from our kitchen that he gave her as a Christmas present, and we passed it around, poured ourselves each a glass, on the rocks. We winced before taking the first sip after my mother made a toast. At that moment, however, it went down smoothly for me. Do I dare say it tasted good? Maybe it was all my emotions being released at once, but it remains the only time that I wasn’t repulsed by scotch.
I’ve grown to like making cocktails again—now of a legal age to actually drink them—as a hobby, crafting them for my friends and family. Videos and how-to guides online helped me make these drinks the correct way, not the two-finger method I would do when making them for Mimi. The sheer number of possible combinations fascinates me; it’s practically endless.
Occasionally, I’ll grab a mini bottle of Johnnie Walker and test if I can stomach it, thinking of Mimi with each sip. Each time I think that maybe this attempt will be the one where I finally understand the taste that Mimi loved so much. I still can’t do it.