The Opposite of Woe by John Hickenlooper & Maximillian Potter

Author:John Hickenlooper & Maximillian Potter [Hickenlooper, John & Potter, Maximillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-05-09T10:24:03+00:00

To: HEDGEHOPPER FROM FUNNYGUTS

Delta Upsilon Fraternity at 6 South Avenue in Ithaca, New York, now a thuggish football player’s animal house, was before World War Two, genteel, although incipiently alcoholic, traditionally the crew house. We had crossed oars on the walls of our dining hall and no varsity or basketball or track types. In my time, we had the stroke and the bow man and the coxswain of the varsity crew. The coxswain was a diminutive but scrappy John Hickenlooper, or is my memory playing tricks on me?

We also had big shots traditionally on publications, the Sun and so on. I myself was one of those, and had become a member because my father, Kurt, Sr., had been a DU at MIT. Reason enough!

Hickenlooper and Brother John Locke had a little snack and cigarette and soft drink concession in a big closet on the second floor of the fraternity house, which they called, “Hickenlooper’s Lockenbar,” but which came to be known as Lockenlooper’s Hickenbar,” or “Lickenbarker’s Loopen Hock,” und so weiter.

John Hickenlooper was an invariably kind and funny young man when I knew him. I think he was two years my senior. Two years was a whole generation back then.

To play varsity soccer or be a varsity swimmer was acceptable. To date a coed was strengst verboten!

Of course, we crafted a beer just for Kurt. His maternal grandfather, the noted American brewer, was Albert Lieber, who owned the original Indianapolis Brewing Company. Lieber’s lager won a gold medal at the Paris World Exposition in 1900. By this time, Russell had left the Wynkoop and died tragically, falling down a flight of stairs while working at a brewpub in New York City in April 1996. But Russell had trained his protégé, Tom Dargen, well. Tom whipped up a batch of the Lieber dark lager that won the gold, or at least a close approximation. Although the recipe was never written down, according to Kurt, the secret ingredient was coffee, in a Duesseldorfer-style lager. We called it “Kurt’s Mile-High Malt.” The label image featured a silk-screened Kurt Vonnegut self- portrait.

Later, Kurt and I collaborated on another project. In 1995 and 1996, my pal Lew Cady, a Wynkoop customer and local public relations whiz, decided that the Wynkoop should brew a special beer to celebrate the dedication of the new $91 million Michael Graves–designed Denver Public Library. We called the brew Denver Public Libation. Better yet, we got famous authors Clive Cussler and John Nichols to write very short stories that would fit on the beer labels for twenty-two-ounce bottles. The second year, Amy Tan said no. Dave Barry said yes. The man they call J. R. Moehringer, who reports on pigs, kindly obliged. So did FunnyGuts.

Kurt wrote “Merlin,” a wee tale about a British science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout, who appears as a character in many of Kurt’s novels. In this story, Kilgore is deprived of beer growing up, thanks to Prohibition, and so he escapes into science fiction books and grows up to write such stories himself.

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