Wisconsin Drinking Quotes

People hate us, blah blah blah, wish we’d go straight to hell, or maybe Wisconsin, since it’s closer, blah blah blah.

Everything is an echo of something I once read. Dream, hope, and celebrate life! Love always comes back in a song. One thing we all have in common is a love for food and drink. Memories never die, and dreams never end! What is time?

We started getting hungry again, and some of the women started chanting, "MEAT, MEAT, MEAT!" We were having steak tartare. It was the only appropriate main course we could think of, for such a graceless theme, and seeing as nobody in the club was confident making it, we had to order it in. I made chips to serve with it, though. I deep-fried them in beef fat. The steak was served in little roulades, raw and minced, like horsemeat. It was topped with a raw egg yolk, chopped onions, pickled beetroot, and capers. I had wanted to use the Wisconsin version, which is served on cocktail bread and dubbed "cannibal sandwich," but Stevie insisted we go classic. Not everyone could stomach theirs with the raw egg yolk, too, and so, unusually for a Supper Club, there was quite a lot left over. We took another break to drink and move about the room. Some of us took MDMA. Emmeline had brought a box of French macarons, tiny pastel-colored things, which we threw over the table, trying to get them into one another's mouth, invariably missing. For our proper dessert, we had a crepe cake: a stack of pancakes bound together with melted chocolate. We ate it with homemade ice cream, which was becoming a real staple.

They spent the next hour nibbling their way through the food stalls, sharing spiral-cut potatoes, pork sandwiches, and cream puffs. They found a table in one of the many shaded beer gardens, and Lou retrieved some ice-cold Summer Shandys to go with their food. The beer had a light lemon edge that offset the malt, making it an ideal hot-summer-day drink. The potato spirals, long twirls coated in bright orange cheese, combined the thin crispiness of a potato chip with a French fry. And the cream puffs... The size of a hamburger on steroids, the two pate a choux ends showcased almost two cups of whipped cream- light, fluffy, and fresh.

MATHEMATICAL MIRACLE Some years ago, I heard a story which has been making the rounds in Midwest A.A. circles for years. I don’t have any names to back up this story, but I have heard it from many sources, and the circumstances sound believable. A man in a small Wisconsin city had been on the program for about three years and had enjoyed contented sobriety through that period. Then bad luck began to hit him in bunches. The firm for which he had worked for some fifteen years was sold; his particular job was phased out of existence, and the plant moved to another city. For several months, he struggled along at odd jobs while looking for a company that needed his specialized experience. Then another blow hit him. His wife was forced to enter a hospital for major surgery, and his company insurance had expired. At this point he cracked, and decided to go on an all-out binge. He didn’t want to stage this in the small city, where everyone knew his sobriety record. So he went to Chicago, checked in at a North Side hotel, and set forth on his project. It was Friday night, and the bars were filled with a swinging crowd. But he was in no mood for swinging—he just wanted to get quietly, miserably drunk. Finally, he found a basement bar on a quiet side street, practically deserted. He sat down on a bar stool and ordered a double bourbon on the rocks. The bartender said, “Yes, sir,” and reached for a bottle. Then the bartender stopped in his tracks, took a long, hard look at the customer, leaned over the bar, and said in a low tone, “I was in Milwaukee about four months ago, and one night I attended an open meeting. You were on the speaking platform, and you gave one of the finest A.A. talks I ever heard.” The bartender turned and walked to the end of the bar. For a few minutes, the customer sat there—probably in a state of shock. Then he picked his money off the bar with trembling hands and walked out, all desire for a drink drained out of him. It is estimated that there are about 8,000 saloons in Chicago, employing some 25,000 bartenders. This man had entered the one saloon in 8,000 where he would encounter the one man in 25,000 who knew that he was a member of A.A. and didn’t belong there. Chicago, Illinois

He tells me they do, but it’s out of service. I feel a wave of relief, until he hands me a cordless phone from behind the bar and says I’m welcome to use it if it’s not long distance. I stare down at the receiver, thinking that this is precisely why Scottie, my best friend since the first grade, told me to stay in and not drink. Batten down the hatches, he had coached me from our hometown of Pewaukee, Wisconsin, explaining that I wasn’t ready to be tested by a buzz

Drink Wisconsinbly: Drink excessively. When 24/7 Wall Street came out with a list of the 20 drunkest cities in America, 12 were in Wisconsin. (Appleton

A LITTLE AFTER FIVE, he went out to the Lexus SUV that he drove outside the Cities, and took off for Wisconsin. He was not in a mood for the scenic tour, so he went straight up I-35 to Highway 8, then east through Chisago City and Lindstrom and past Center City to Taylors Falls, then across the St. Croix into Wisconsin, north on Highway 82, off on River Road and finally, down a dirt lane lined with beech and oak trees to a redwood house perched on a bluff over the river. The front door was propped open with a river rock. The governor was sitting on a four-season porch, already closed in for the winter, that looked over the river valley. When Lucas banged on the screen door, he called, “Straight through to the porch. Get a beer out of the kitchen, or make yourself a drink.

I would not have even considered you an appetizer. Rats that have fed on syphilitic sailors would be preferable to drinking from you. I swear, I can smell Krispy Kremes and cheese curds oozing from your every pathetic pore.

Returning to Bath, Dahmer moved in with his father and stepmother. However, it was not long before his excessive drinking got him in trouble with the law. In October 1981, he was arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. His dad tried to get him some help and introduced him to Alcoholics Anonymous, but it didn’t take. Thoughts of his earlier deed refused to go away, and his drinking caused conflict in the home. To appease his wife, his father suggested Jeff move in with his paternal grandmother in West Allis, Wisconsin—a working-class suburb of Milwaukee. His father felt it would serve two purposes: Jeff could look after his grandmother, who was getting on in years, and with him gone, there would finally be peace in their home. Dahmer’s move to Wisconsin was the beginning of some real soul searching. His grandmother was a very religious woman. He loved and admired her and felt she could help him get control of his life. She was kindly, loving, and tolerant, and she had a quiet serenity about her that he craved. He felt that religion might provide a way out of his predicament. They discussed religious matters, and he began to accompany her to Sunday service and weekday Bible study. This kept him sober during the day, but when Grandma retired for the evening, he began to drink again. He knew he had an alcohol problem, but felt his need to drink arose from the horrible memory he carried with him. He could never get it out of his mind. No matter how hard he tried, the knowledge of what he had done stayed with him.

At this point, Dahmer looked at us with complete honesty in his voice and said, “This is when I decided to give in to the dark side. Grandma’s way was not working; I was miserable and lonely, so I decided to indulge my sexual lusts and fantasies.” The first thing he did was buy some gay porn magazines. He kept them in a suitcase hidden in the fruit cellar. He spent hours viewing and masturbating to the images of lean, muscular men performing sexual acts, but over time, this proved unfulfilling. He learned about Milwaukee’s gay bar scene through these magazines, an area just south of downtown with a cluster of taverns and dance clubs catering to the gay community. Dahmer began to frequent these clubs on weekends, enjoying the drinking and lifestyle. He discovered a gay bathhouse on Wisconsin Avenue, where he paid for a separate cubicle to store his clothes, using it for extracurricular activities with other patrons. His fantasies of dominating, killing, and dismembering were still with him; however, he managed to control himself and tried to enjoy being with men and indulging in sexual activity. He never had a lasting relationship with anyone he met there, and often felt lonely and empty.

He thought for a while before beginning. “I think it was October of 1990. I was walking on Wisconsin Avenue when I met him. I struck up a conversation and asked if he wanted to come home to my apartment for some cocktails. I also mentioned that I would pay him a hundred dollars if he let me take some nude pictures of him. He agreed, and we walked to my apartment, where we engaged in some light sex and I gave him the drink. Soon he was out, and I made love to him for about an hour or so. I decided that I would kill him, and used my hands to strangle him until he stopped breathing.” Murphy interrupted by placing the Polaroid picture found on the table in the apartment. It depicted the victim straddled on his back over the side of a bathtub. There was an incision made from the bottom of his chin to the top of his genitals. The viscera was pulled out of the body and lying, as if on display, on top of the torso. The colored Polaroid was shocking. The moist, red entrails glistened, revealing the intestines and internal organs. “What’s this all about?” Murphy said, pointing to the ghastly sight. Dahmer picked it up and shrugged. “I wanted a picture of his insides, so I placed him in the bathroom and cut him open. I pulled the viscera from his body with my hands. The look and feel of it gave me unbelievable pleasure, and I masturbated and made love to him by placing my penis in it, like having intercourse.” He took a long, slow drag from his cigarette without looking up as the rest of us sat in silence. We had identified our sixth victim: David Thomas. Murphy, serious as ever, finally broke the silence. “How did you dispose of this one? Did you keep any of his parts?” Dahmer answered that he became leery of placing the bones and flesh in the trash for fear of discovery. This is when he began to use the muriatic acid. He tried to save the skull by boiling it; however, he wanted to speed up the drying process and used a higher oven temperature. The increased heat popped the skull into smaller sections. Because it was ruined, he threw it into the acid. There were no remaining parts of this victim.

My senior year in high school, Mom and Dad went through a divorce. After I graduated, my mother took my brother and moved to Wisconsin. We had relatives there. My dad was always busy at work, and I was left alone most of the time. I had the house all to myself. I never really had any close friends in school; I was kind of a loner and pretty shy around people. My parents were not big drinkers, but they kept a fully stocked bar in the home. I was lonely and started to drink. It made me feel better; I could talk to people and fit in, but I wasn’t that good at it and I’d usually end up drunk and alone in my house. I’m sure it was at this time that I began to develop feelings of not wanting to be alone, especially at night. It seemed as if everybody was leaving me. My father had started a new relationship with my current stepmother and spent a lot of time at her house. He said that I was old enough to take care of myself, so I ended up alone. I hated it. I didn’t like sleeping alone in that big house. It made me angry. I started to have fleeting fantasies of killing someone. I don’t know where they came from, but they did. They were always intertwined, sex and killing. I tried to get them out of my mind, but the sexual fantasy was powerful and I masturbated for hours thinking about it. The fantasy was always the same. I met a good-looking man, brought him home, had sex with him, and then killed him.