THE STORY BEHIND COCKTAILS WITH GOD
Three novels. Three very different battlegrounds. And one rather long argument with God.
I never set out to write a trilogy called Cocktails with God.
In fact, just before the whole thing began, I'd sworn I was never going to write another book as long as I lived.
I'd spent the better part of a year working on a manuscript when my computer crashed, taking everything with it. No backup. No way to recover the work. Gone.
I was furious.
And naturally, I blamed God.
By then, He and I already had a rather complicated history, dating all the way back to my childhood and a motorcycle accident at eighteen that left me with a near-death experience I'd spend the next fifty years trying to make sense of.
So this wasn't exactly our first go-around.
That afternoon, trying to get my head around everything I'd lost, I went into my bedroom, lay down, and tried to calm myself. I'd just announced out loud to God my retirement from writing, and I meant every word of it.
Then something really strange happened.
While lying there wide awake, three words suddenly came into my mind.
Cocktails with God.
I sat straight up in bed.
What the hell was that? I looked around the room. It was still light outside.
I couldn't shake the feeling that God Himself may have just handed me a new book title. And considering how angry I was with Him, I wasn't liking that one bit.
But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to give Him a little something to remember me by. For all of eternity.
If He wanted me to write Cocktails with God, I'd show Him Cocktails with God.
On steroids.
It was almost like: "Hold my beer and watch this shit."
COCKTAILS WITH GOD IN THE AFTERLIFE
I bought another computer later that day, went home, and started writing like a madman.
Twenty-eight days later, I'd written a novel of about 200 pages. And I don't think I'd ever had so much fun writing a book in my life.
The story was about a young fellow named Buddy Wilde who suffers a ruptured aneurysm, winds up in the afterlife, and comes face-to-face with God.
Except this wasn't exactly the God I'd been hearing about in church all those years.
This God was a bit of a whack job.
And Buddy wasn't quite all there either.
But he certainly wasn't about to fall to his knees, kiss God's ass, and thank Him for the privilege of being there. Buddy had questions. Lots of questions.
About religion, the Bible, the afterlife, and some of the pretty outrageous things God supposedly did back in His biblical days.
And since I was writing the story, I could finally put God in a position where He couldn't just ignore me.
Before long, I'd brought Mother Teresa, comedian Sam Kinison, Janis Joplin, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Jones of Jonestown, and a whole collection of other interesting characters into the story.
I even gave Sam Kinison a couple of hot blonde twins named Catchme and Doome.
I was having a ball.
Somewhere along the way, I decided heaven needed a neighborhood bar.
Why the hell not?
So I opened the Big Bang Bar & Grill, where the dearly departed could stop in for a drink, shoot the breeze, cry in their beer, and maybe give God a piece of their mind.
Of course, once I had a bar, I needed something to serve.
And that's where the original twenty-two cocktails came from.
But I wasn't going to invent a bunch of drink names, throw some ingredients together on paper, and call them recipes. I wanted real cocktails worth drinking.
My dear friends Benjamin and Susan invited me to spend about a month at their home in Fort Lauderdale. Benjamin had designed the cover for the novel, and we had a few things left to finish.
Over the first few days, we spent nearly $1,200 on booze, mixers, shrimp, chicken wings, and whatever else we thought might come in handy.
Then the fun really started.
We invited friends over and started making drinks. We'd mix one, taste it, make a few adjustments, and try it again. And again, if necessary.
There were some pretty interesting evenings, plenty of laughter, and a few mornings when I suspect we weren't feeling quite as enthusiastic about our research efforts.
But we got the job done.
All twenty-two cocktails were unique, authentic, and named partly in the hope of rubbing God the wrong way.
Looking back, I suppose we could have called the whole thing a research project.
But that might be stretching the truth just a little.
What I enjoyed most about writing that first novel was finally getting to take on some of the religious nonsense I'd been questioning for years without having to write another serious book about it.
I could make fun of things, exaggerate, put words in God's mouth, and have Buddy drive Him right up a wall.
And believe me, Buddy had plenty to say.
COCKTAILS WITH GOD: IN THE HEART OF THE BEAST
About ten years later, following the 2016 presidential election, I found myself getting increasingly disgusted with what was going on in Washington.
Not that I'd ever been particularly impressed with politicians or either political party.
But watching the whole circus unfold gave me an idea.
Maybe it was time for Buddy Wilde and God to have another little get-together.
So I brought Buddy back.
He'd survived his near-death experience in the first novel and was now married, raising a couple of kids, and working out of town on a construction project at a hotel just a few blocks from the White House.
And wouldn't you know it, God showed up again.
Their relationship hadn't improved much.
Before long, the two of them were drinking themselves into oblivion, getting into one ridiculous situation after another, and arguing about just about everything going on in the world.
Buddy wanted to know why God was allowing so much corruption, dishonesty, and suffering right under His nose.
God, on the other hand, was wondering why He ever created Buddy in the first place.
Things eventually got so heated that God threatened to end Buddy's life in a matter of days.
Apparently, the Almighty wasn't especially fond of being challenged.
Especially by a smart-ass like Buddy Wilde.
And since this was Washington, D.C., I figured the story needed a bar that fit the neighborhood.
So I created Liar's, Cheats & Thieves.
Above the entrance was the bar's slogan:
"Where Everyone Knows Your Game."
The place was crawling with politicians, lobbyists, government insiders, special-interest characters, dark souls, and assorted local hooligans. It was a place where you could buy virtually anything—or anyone—on earth for a price.
In other words, it wasn't all that different from Washington itself.
And yes, there were many more cocktails to name and test.
Campaign Promise. Tax Cut. Green Card. Term Limit. Too Big to Fail.
I developed those recipes with the help of bartenders and willing customers around the Twin Cities.
By the time I finished, the manuscript had grown to nearly 500 pages.
Apparently, I'd found quite a few things to say.
But underneath all the political nonsense, I was still wrestling with the same question.
If God really was running this world, why the hell was He allowing so much of it to go to hell?
I'd already had my spiritual experience. I wasn't looking for another one.
I wanted some answers.
COCKTAILS WITH GOD IN THE LAND OF 10,000 LIES
By the time I got around to writing the third novel, I'd already dragged God through religion and politics.
But there was another institution I'd spent a good deal of time questioning.
Our wonderful legal system.
I'd seen enough over the years to wonder how ordinary people could be expected to obey every law—more laws than one person has ever read, much less consented to being governed by—while some of the people enforcing those laws seemed to operate under an entirely different set of rules.
And I couldn't help wondering whether our system of justice was really about justice for all, or more about just us—the people inside the system looking out for one another.
So Buddy Wilde was going to have another opportunity to straighten God out.
This time, I opened the story with Buddy sitting in a Minnesota county jail cell, wondering how in the hell he'd gotten himself into such a mess after pushing back against the system.
His opening observation pretty well summed up his feelings:
"A weekend spent in the county jail is not nearly as bad as some people make it out to be—it's a million times worse."
From there, Buddy and God picked up right where they'd left off.
Only this time, Buddy had a few things to say about judges, lawyers, law enforcement, the courts, and the enormous power government can exercise over somebody's life.
I called the novel Cocktails with God in the Land of 10,000 Lies, a little play on Minnesota's nickname, the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
And yes, of course, there were more cocktails.
Fair Trial. Not Guilty Verdict. Plea Bargain. Death Row Pardon. Stay of Execution. Get Out of Jail "Free" Card.
But underneath all the ridiculous situations, the drinking, and Buddy's ongoing arguments with God, I was still trying to work something out for myself.
I'd spent years questioning religion, government, and the legal system.
And somehow, every time I followed those questions far enough, I wound up right back where I'd started.
With God.
SO WHAT WAS ALL THIS REALLY ABOUT?
Looking back now, I can see something about those three novels that I didn't fully appreciate while writing them.
I thought I was taking on religion, politics, and the legal system.
And I was.
But the one I was really putting on trial was God.
And I had a rather hard-core list of questions for Him.
If You're really there...
If You're really paying attention...
If You're really the God the Bible says You are...
Then how the hell do You explain what's going on down here?
You see, when I was eighteen, I had a near-death experience that left me with memories of a place, and a kind of love and peace, that I would spend the next fifty years trying to make sense of.
And the more I looked at the world around me, the harder it became to reconcile what I'd experienced with what I'd been taught about God.
I never really doubted that God existed.
What I questioned was whether the God I'd been taught to believe in bore much resemblance to the One I believed I'd encountered myself on the other side.
And if He really was the all-powerful, all-knowing Creator I'd heard so much about growing up, I wanted to know why He seemed to be sitting on His hands while so much of humanity was going to hell in a handbasket.
Writing those novels gave me a chance to get some of that out of my system.
Sometimes I was angry. Sometimes I was laughing my ass off. And sometimes I was asking questions I'd been carrying around since I was a kid.
I didn't put much effort into marketing those books. I had some copies printed and handed them out, but I wasn't particularly interested in turning them into bestsellers.
I had things I wanted to say.
And writing those books gave me my best shot at saying them.
The three novels are now out of print, but I wouldn't trade the experience of writing them for anything.
And those original twenty-two cocktails?
Well, after all these years, they've found a new home in Cocktails with God: The Bartender's Recipe Guide — 22 Heavenly Drinks to Die For.
As for what happened between God and me, and where that nearly fifty-year argument eventually led...
That's another story.
And I finally told it in To Heaven and Back in the Blink of an Eye.