chapter ten
Confessions of an Armenian Moonshiner
For all our big city lust, we still tell time by the farmer’s clock. There is a season of bloom, the race between the wind and hail and the blossom trying to set into bud. There is a season of harvest, though we plant so many different crops that it never seems to end, from the earliest stone fruit in April to the latest table grape in October to the citrus of February and March. Every season comes with its own uncertainty, but no season causes more civic fret than late summer, when the raisin farmer sets down his bunches of Thompson seedless grapes in the sun and prays that no rain will fall upon them. We all pray with him, even though by that time the sky is as foul as the sky in China and every third kid is on an inhaler, and a little rain would be God’s blessing. We are standing near the halfway point in our proud progression from raisin town to another Los Angeles, yet to be caught muttering any supplication but the supplication of a farmer is still a thing of sacrilege. If we are no longer farmers, we once were farmers and might be again, if we listened to our hearts.
Between the family vineyard and me stood a grocery store and a bar, a generation of waywardness. While I didn’t exactly plot my return to the land, I did the best a farmer’s grandson could do with a third of an acre in suburbia. Each April, I reclaimed another chunk of hardpan beside the swimming pool, planted my vegetable garden, and thinned the buds on my fruit trees. And each January, the season of fog, when the pair of grapevines outside our bedroom window went from rank to bare, I waited for the call from my brother-in-law, the one real farmer still left in our family. “The mash,” he’d say in a clandestine voice, as if a crime had already begun. “It’s ready.”
We had been making moonshine in the San Joaquin Valley for as long as we had been growing fruit. Each immigrant group swore by a different mash. The Armenian and his raisin. The Slav and his plum. The Italian and his blood-red Alicante bouschet. My great-grandmother Azniv, who died when I was seven, was a moonshiner. She kept her bottle of ooug-he, raki, white lightning flavored with anise, in a burlap sack two feet under the earth of the vineyard where my father was born. Abscessed tooth, infected ear, sore throat, sinus headache, 105-degree fever, dandruff, you-name-it was alleviated by a slap or swish or rub of her sauce. My father’s brother, Navo, never forgot a flu that knocked him flat on the ranch in Depression time. “I was aching head to toe, and she took that raki and rubbed it over my body, wrapped me in a towel, and put me to bed. The next morning I woke up and it was gone. I had sweated the whole thing out. Some years, when our crop came in short, we were too poor to afford a doctor. That damn raki became our medicine.”
Back in Prohibition, the uninterrupted farmland between Bakersfield and Stockton ranked as one of the “wettest” regions in the country. Local boosters tried to put it off on all those old country grandmas and grandpas cooking their home brew, but Prohibition agent Tom Niceley, a valley boy, knew better. He devised a sting where he hid in the rear compartment of a black roadster that belonged to a moonshiner turned informant. As the moonshiner pulled up to the houses of top police officials and handed over his bribes, a crumpled up Niceley took notes from under the hood. It was 1924, and he couldn’t believe his ears. Three immigrants from Italy were running a bootlegging syndicate that extended from the vineyards and fig orchards of the west side to downtown’s Whiskey Row. They were clearing an incredible $120,000 a year; half the profit, five grand a month, was going to the Fresno Police Department. The scandal grabbed headlines coast to coast, but only one of the thirteen police officers was convicted—for a minor offense. Prohibition lifted, and the Italian kingpin went into the ice cream business.
As the old immigrants died off, moonshining went the way of blacksmithing. My grandfather Aram was too preoccupied with Soviet Armenian politics, and my father and uncle too busy with sports, to bother with the custom. Somewhere in the move from the Rolinda ranch to the Peacock Markets to Ara’s Apartments nightclub, the family still got lost. I was in my early forties when I decided, maybe as a way of reaching back, to try my hand at moonshining. In the winter of 2001, I followed my brother-in-law to a vineyard outside the town of Fowler, into a wood shack behind the main house where the farmer, one year dead, had kept an old copper still. There we pledged an oath of secrecy with four other cooks, all of them Armenian farmers, and produced our first batch of raki. I didn’t play golf or fish, and it was about a sublime a day as I’ve ever spent with a group of guys. We stuffed our faces with Armenian cheeses and sandwiches made of peda bread and the thin slices of cured sirloin we called basturma. We passed around a box of wooden matches and took turns igniting the clear liquid that came drip-dripping out of the coiled line. If the flame burned blue, we had proof of its potency, proof of its high proof. The wet, cold air went straight through us, and standing for hours over a contraption that utilized only a single burner for heat was no way to keep warm. The real fire was in the bottle, the first batch at 160 proof and the second batch at 140 proof and then a new run where we poured the weaker stuff back into the mash and cooked it again and out came something very close to the supernatural. No heat moved faster from tongue to chest, and each shot—two, three, four—went down smoother than the last. Farmers were a suspicious, guarded lot, but this was a buzz that gave great lubrication to tender, metaphysical musings about life and death and the moral quandaries each of us felt in an age when man had never been more attached to machine, never been more alien to himself. For a whole afternoon in the world, as Saroyan might say it, farmers became philosophers and journalists poets. We waxed even as we peed, unzipping our pants right there in the vineyard beneath a big orange tree. That night, I slept like I had never slept in my life. I dreamed like I hadn’t dreamed since I was kid. Was this how opium felt? I had no intention of waking up but when I did, I could sense no headache, no sluggishness, just a sensation of peace that soaked through my entire body. In the pantry, I stashed an old vinegar bottle filled with second run and over the next several months practiced great resolve in bringing it out only on the most special occasion. I figured it would last me a year, until next January’s cook. Mysteriously, I ran dry in midsummer. Only later would I discover that my wife, dreams coming up short, had been sneaking a little shot at bedtime.
For the sake of production, my brother-in-law ditched that leaky copper still and replaced it with a gleaming stainless steel pot and top designed in the shape of the Tin Man. Not only did it distill twice as much mash each run, but it was far less likely to blow up in our faces. We transported the behemoth from place to place, even cooked a couple of winters in a backyard in the middle of suburbia. The plan for 2008 was to return to tradition and find a setting deep in the country. I waited for the call from my brother-in-law, Avedis as he will be known in this story, a tale in which the names of the cooks have been changed to the names of their paternal grandfathers. January passed. February passed. March passed. We were two-thirds finished with April, on a Friday the week before our annual and very solemn commemoration of the Armenian genocide, when he finally gave the word.
“The mash is done. We’re taking the still to Suren’s new ranch. It’s right along the river. Sunday about eleven.”
“Should I bring some food? Mezza?”
“I had a lamb slaughtered and cut into chops,” he said. “Khachig has been marinating them for three days. He’ll do the barbecue and cook the pilaf.”
“Sounds great, but we’ve never done it this late. The fog’s gone. How are we going to throw off the scent of the revenue agents?”
He knew I was only half joking. “Hell, we’ve been cooking for the past two years in my backyard. You’re the one who complained that there was no poetry back there. Suren’s vineyard is along the river. It’s perfect. No one’s going to find us.”
It was true that it was spring, that the canes on the vines had gone from vacant wood to new green, and we could drink and eat lamb in the sun and pee big streams (little streams) in the rows. But as a matter of ritual, the fog was not an easy thing to give up. Maybe there weren’t any more Tom Niceleys prowling the plain, but as a student of moonshining lore, I liked to believe there was still some risk involved. Unlike our cousins in the Ozarks, we had no hills to hide in. The valley, its hog wallows, had been leveled flat by the Fresno scraper more than a century ago. Even in the country, forty acres apart, neighbors had a pretty good notion what busied neighbors. The prudent moonshiner, looking for cover, waited for the fog. Ours happened to be no ordinary vapor. “Tule fog,” we called it, the curse of the Yokuts, their get-even for the white man draining Tulare Lake. You’ve taken our inland sea, its fish and turtle, and turned it into cotton fields. The lake may be gone, but its mists will haunt you forever. Each winter, as the great cloud descended, people had to be reminded all over again of its peril. In the zero visibility, they drove like monkeys down Highway 99, the deadly pileups sometimes numbering fifty and sixty vehicles.
If Avedis was all right with letting the season of fog pass and cooking the mash a good ten weeks late, then the rest of us would surely follow. He was the most precise and careful man we knew. Among farmers, he was considered one of the finest table grape growers around—his Flames and Crimsons bigger, crisper, and more colorful, if not always tastier, than the rest. The agriculture he practiced was a different one than our grandfather’s. His reputation lived and died by the timing of the decisions he made in April and May—when to apply the sulfur, when to spray for mites, when to administer a first, second, and third shot of gib (gibberellin), agriculture’s version of the human growth hormone. By removing the seed from the fruit, we remove its testicles, so to speak. The vine no longer produces the gibberellic acid that naturally thins every bunch and sizes and colors each berry. To replace the seed, the grape grower applies a synthetic version of the acid in a series of methodical sprayings from spring to summer. Gibbing, they called it. Avedis believed that a single small error in his coverage—one drop too heavy or too light, one day too soon or too late—was enough to change everything. Problem was, he wouldn’t know how badly he had screwed up for another ninety days, when his mistakes stared up at him from the bottom of a box. “I deal in the parts per million” is how he described his life. We relied on Avedis to plan and conduct our cooks with the same sort of precision. At harvest’s end, he saved five or six trays of raisins that he had no intention of eating. He dumped stems and all into a barrel, filled it with a few buckets of water, threw in five pounds of sugar and eight packets of Champagne yeast and closed the lid. Each week, with his considerable nose, he measured the ferment. Only when the raisins bloated into something that looked very much like pinto beans did he pronounce the mash ready.
As I drove out to the river that day, so clear that the Sierra popped up out of the asphalt just beyond, I couldn’t help but puzzle over the strange turns in my life. A year ago, at our last cook, I was a married man, the father of three children living in or near the nest, a senior writer for the Los Angeles Times magazine, a Little League coach, and a backyard farmer. Now my marriage and career, which began in the same month in 1981, had ended in the same month in 2007. It made for the nice round number of twenty-five years, half my life. As such tales often go, mine was tedious and more than a little self-serving, and there was a temptation to trace both losses to the same cause. I had written a story in the spring of 2007 about the continued denial of the Armenian genocide, a story that editors on the national desk were considering for page one. The day before it was scheduled to run, the managing editor decided to kill it, for no other reason than I am an Armenian. I would have not believed that a man so savvy could have put forward such a sorry rationale, but he told me himself in a note. I had never had a story spiked or even gutted, and I saw no choice but to fight it. My wife, who came from a family of hardy Dutchmen, saw my public challenge to the newspaper—and its certain fate—as part of a “martyr syndrome” that afflicted not only me but my entire tribe. As it turned out, I left the paper with an apology from the publisher and a monetary settlement, but the breach at home could not be repaired. And so I moved into a condo a few blocks away, without enough open dirt to grow a tomato, and was soon joined by our seventeen-year-old son. Meanwhile, our daughter took her third year of college from Berkeley to Buenos Aires, and our youngest child, a ten-year-old boy, split his time between households. The lines my wife drew were not to be trifled with. While the house was still half mine, I was told not to trespass. When I heard that the fruit trees had set heavy, I sneaked into the backyard and tried to thin as much as I could. One of the peach limbs had broken off from all the weight, and my Meyer lemon tree was nearly dead from lack of water. In the garden, I could see that little Jake had taken my grandfather’s hoe and was preparing the ground for a planting, not understanding that the window for summer vegetables had already passed.
I turned north on the other side of Dickenson and headed straight to the bluff, slowing down to let a 1931 Ford Model A pickup, candy apple red, perfectly restored, take the road in front of me. Closer up, I could see that it was Suren showing one of the boys the lay of his new land. “Almost there,” he shouted out the window. “Follow us.” His smile was easy, and he spoke in a Dust Bowl twang that sometimes set down on the tongue of an Armenian or Swede or Japanese living in the valley. In the cut of the vineyard, he had remodeled a sweet little ranch house, and behind the house stood a large metal shed he had filled with all his collectibles: a dozen motorcycles of various makes and vintages, autographs of legendary race car drivers and famous actors with a passion for speed, a guitar signed by B. B. King, pinball machines, antique signs, and a 1935 Ford two-door sedan resting high above on a rack. The shed was Suren’s playroom. Indeed, the whole vineyard was his hobby. He did not have a farming bone in his body. His father had run a string of liquor stores. Suren built from scratch a top-selling commercial sign company. And yet he had found himself a restless man trapped in a fancy subdivision behind gates. His wife, who had saved his life once before, understood his discontent. As harebrained as his plan had sounded, she and the two children agreed to follow him into the country. “I’ve never felt the kind of peace I felt since moving here,” he said. “I’ve got a farm manager who takes care of everything. I just walk the rows and take a deep breath.”
Next to the pump, alongside the first row of vines, Avedis had set up the still. He was halfway into cooking the first batch. Some of the boys were already well lit.
“Nishan,” they called out, using the Armenian name for Mark. “Eench ga? What’s up?”
“What, you jackasses don’t wait for me anymore?”
“Hey, you got those Saroyan hours. We’re farmers. Gets to noon and our day is done.”
The group had grown since the last cook, and not all of them raised fruit for a living. There was my younger brother, Aram, the high school football coach, and Levon, the accountant, and Kourag, the government inspector, and Arakel, his supervisor at the USDA.
“And I was worried about the feds busting in,” I said, laughing.
I looked around for Khachig. Sure enough, he was standing over the barbecue, swaying his hips to a John Lee Hooker tune that blared from the sound system inside the shed. He managed to be barrel-chested and slumped-shouldered at the same time, and his manner of grilling was to stick his Fu Manchu right into the flame. When it came to lamb, he was every bit as deft as his father, who had given up after years of hard luck in the restaurant business. Khachig, lesson learned, did his grilling strictly for the church. Picnics and men’s club nights.
“Kid, I’ll be throwing on the chops in ten minutes,” he shouted. “It’s good young lamb marinated well. So they’ll be done in no time.”
I had made a batch of hummus and set out a plate of baby organic carrots as dipping sticks. “Organic, smorganic,” Avedis said. “An excuse to pay a dollar more per bag.” After sampling a handful, even he, Mr. Pesticide, had to admit that they were sweeter and crisper than the conventionally grown. And they went nicely with a hummus heavy on the garlic, lemon, and paprika.
“Goddamn, this hummus is good,” Khachig said. Of course, there is no higher compliment. I thanked him, and that’s when he started working on me, the lapsed one. “Why don’t you join the men’s society? We could sure use a hummus maker. We don’t require any blood. Just show up once a month for dinner. Maybe give a little talk.” Suren, the men’s society president, had leaned on me the summer before at the blessing of the grape picnic. As before, I nodded and smiled, but otherwise steered clear of any commitment. My mother’s father had been the priest of our church. I was an altar boy from the age of fifteen to nineteen. But once I left Fresno for my first job at the Baltimore Evening Sun, a strange sort of exile happened, one that had nothing to do with geographical distance. I was a journalist now. No longer could I afford all the entanglements—and there were plenty—that came with being an Armenian in America. I loved my people, but I dared not allow myself to be swallowed up, pen and all, by their ardent designs for me. Even as I returned to California and took up residence in Pasadena, amid a new world of Armenian immigrants, I plodded along a wary fringe. I became the Chinese reporter, the Hmong reporter, the Mexican farmworker reporter, the black Okie reporter, the prison reporter. Only at the end did I become “the Armenian reporter.”
I walked over to the still, the Tin Man’s head held down tight with vises. The first run had finished in a flame of blue. Avedis, hydrometer in hand, was taking a more precise measurement. “It’s not quite 160 proof. About 155.” Not much, I could see, was staying in the bottle. Surab, the raisin farmer from Sanger, poured me a first shot. Right off, I could taste the licorice of the anise, a lacing more heavy than in past runs. “Damn, that’s mighty fine.”
There is a notion, backed by science, that the mash doesn’t count, that no matter what goes into a moonshiner’s pot—raisins, plums, Alicante bouschet—what comes out is the same white lightning. Because raisins pack a lot more sugar than plums or grapes, the alcohol comes out stronger. But as far as taste goes, the only thing that makes raki different from slivovitz and slivovitz different from grappa is the flavoring added to the mash. Maybe I was trying too hard, but once I got past the anise, I swore I could smell the raisin and taste the vineyard in our drink. One thing for sure, it doesn’t mellow. Fresh from the still, two years in the bottle—it gets no better, and no worse.
In the smoke of the barbecue, my brother the coach had cornered Kourag, a former tackle. Kourag had been playing coy all afternoon, letting us know he had gotten some rare action the night before but not telling us her name or ethnic background. He was in his late twenties but might as well have been sixty the way he was glued to old country habits. “No American girl, not even an Armenian one, is going to take you,” my brother poked at him. “You need to go back to Hyestan like Yeraz did.”
At six feet eight, Yeraz was a giant with a squeaky voice who traveled from Fresno to Armenia with a tape measure in hand. He announced to the country’s elders that the girl he was seeking to take home had to be five feet nine, no less, no more. In the land of squatty Armenians, this was, shall we say, a tall order. Yeraz managed to find one young woman who truly hit the mark but before a spring wedding could be held, she got a glimpse of Los Angeles and ditched him. On his return journey to Armenia, his specifications grew more accommodating. His future wife could be as short as five feet seven. This time, the young woman agreed to marry Yeraz without delay, and he flew her straight back to Fresno. Two children later, he was king of his castle.
Khachig called us to the food line, and we filled our plates high and sat down in the vineyard. He had cooked the lamb chops to perfection, pink in the middle with the sear and smoke of seasoned grape wood and sweetened by wine and purple onions. As for his pilaf, it was lousy.
For a long minute, as the sun beat down gently on our faces, no one said a word. When Hagop the cabinet maker finally broke the silence, he spoke for us all, by which I mean every sentimental Armenian.
“How did we ever get away from this shit?”
He didn’t mean it as a question, we all knew, but that didn’t stop us from throwing out answers. Our wives, Armenian and otherwise. Our jobs, big and small. The computer. The cell phone. The hoops and loops of government and the busybody unions too.
Hagop told the story of his uncle, Harry Bedoian, who operated the family cabinet shop in town. “One day the union man came calling. He asked my uncle, ‘How many minorities do you have working here?’ My uncle answered, ‘Three.’ He said, ‘What are their names?’ My uncle said, ‘Bedoian, Bedoian, Bedoian.’ ‘Those aren’t minorities,’ he said. ‘The hell they’re not,’ my uncle said. ‘Go out and count ’em.’”
We Armenians hail from the Caucasus and could be considered the original White Men. Yet we hesitate whenever we are asked to fill out one of those government forms identifying our race. I myself have never checked off the box for “white.” I go down the list to “other” and write in “Armenian.”
Levon reasoned that we suffered a peculiar fate. Even in our own homeland, where our presence preceded the original Turk by a thousand years, we were the minority. A tribe of Christians with Persia on one side and the Ottoman Empire on the other. What better explained our tragedy than the scapegoating of the minority?
“The Turks,” Khachig shouted, a fourth shot of raki now coating his throat. “The Turks. Kid, I hate them for my grandfather.”
“I guess we’re now officially into the massacres,” Suren said, raising a chuckle.
“No,” Khachig snapped. “I haven’t even gotten to the subject of the massacres.”
Even if he hadn’t been drinking, he had ample reason to feel melancholy. Just three weeks earlier, he had buried his grandmother, Zari Bekian. Born in the village of Kharpet, a refugee who migrated from Havana to Detroit to Fresno, she had been one of the oldest living survivors of the genocide, dying of natural causes at the age of ninety-nine.
“In the village, the Turks were running across the rooftops with big swords, killing every Armenian they could find,” Khachig said. “And these four Armenian sisters, these short little bastards, found a way to stop them. These sisters, I’ve forgotten their last name, about four feet tall each, they tricked them into sex and then slit their throats. They hid knives in their belts and double-crossed them. Kid, these were great women. They killed more than a hundred Turks this way. That a boy!”
Evidently there was more to the story, details his father had passed on to him, but Khachig was having a hard time getting beyond the sex and sliced throats and near-midget dimensions of the avengers. The whole time he was talking, he was churning like one of those machines that mix dough to a Stevie Ray Vaughn tune. I couldn’t help it. I was laughing and crying at the same time.
“Let me tell you,” Suren said. “We had a big-ass house with big columns back in the old country. When the Turkish soldiers came, they threw the babies into the air and caught them on their swords. Then they took the men, women, and children out into the desert and let them die one by one.”
“The Der er Zor,” Avedis said. “The desert in Syria. That’s where they were made to march.”
“One and a half million dead,” Hagop said. “A nation vanished from its three-thousand-year homeland. And somehow that doesn’t add up to genocide.”
“Why must we always compare ourselves to the Jews?” Kourag asked. “As if their Holocaust is our validation. Didn’t we suffer first? Wasn’t our blood spilled onto our own land, and not some borrowed land? Was it not Hitler who took his lesson from the Turk?”
Khachig was standing nearly still now, holding a shot glass in one hand and sweeping his other hand across the big blue sky. It was a posture of great speechifying that we knew well from our grandfathers, and we braced ourselves. “It’s no accident that this valley looks like valley of Kharpet,” Khachig said. “No accident that these mountains look like Ararat. Our coming here as refugees, what we ended up building, is a spit in the eye of the Turk. This whole day, the vineyard, the lamb, the moonshine, is a spit in his fucking eye.”
My first impulse was to applaud, in part because I was the one who had egged his performance on, but I thought better. Here we were, in the comfort of America, two generations removed from our grandfathers, trying to recreate a small piece of their world. And in our attempt to keep alive what they had been through, and perhaps even understand the madness of our tribe, we could not get beyond the banal and the grotesque. We ourselves had assumed the form of caricature, repeating platitudes we had learned at the age of ten, as if gathered around us in the dust of the vineyard was an audience of strangers who had no inkling of our story. The first Christian nation. The first genocide of the twentieth century. The forgotten holocaust. Our clumsy performance could not be explained by drink. Throughout my adult life, I had witnessed much the same at church, at picnics, wherever Armenians of my generation came together. This is how seventy-five years of Turkish denial had stuck. We did not know how to talk to each other about the past. Our incomprehension at what the Turks had done to us nearly a century ago, an evisceration kept forever fresh by the affront of denial, a denial that portrayed us not as the killed but the killers, had left us a muttering mess. We could not distill our history, we could not extract and pass on the lessons to our daughters and sons, because our history had been left undone.
We did not spend the rest of the afternoon, thank God, spouting murder and revenge. With Martyrs Day less than a week away, we gave our nod and moved on. As the sun worked its way behind the shed, we talked about our love and hopes for our children, our abiding perplexity over what makes a woman truly happy, our irritable bowels, PSA readings, the dream houses we still planned to build, the books we still plotted to write, the farmland we still intended to buy (those who weren’t farmers) or sell to a developer (those who were). We wondered if our sons and maybe even our daughters would one day dust the cobwebs off our still and strike the match. I told them about my youngest boy tending to a couple of tomato plants that had managed to come up from seeds in what used to be my garden. He would make an excellent moonshiner someday. We talked until close to six in the evening, until the third batch was finished and the mash had petered out. Not counting what had been siphoned from the spigot, and it was considerable, we had manufactured seven liters of the finest stuff. It had been a good day. We hugged each other good-bye and pledged to do it again in another few weeks, at another vineyard on the east side. As I drove along the river heading home, I knew I wouldn’t be making the second cook. Summer was already in the air, and the 107-degree days of the harvest would take us right into fall, and the raisins and almonds would come in together, and right behind them would be the pomegranates and tangerines and before you knew it, after the first rain, the lid would close down on the valley and the fog would settle in, and the old Yokut would get his last laugh. I would wait until then.