A Sublime Moonlight Massacre: Fritz Godard Lands in Starkville

This is adapted from the script of Episode 92 — “Faraway Review + My First Time on Board Game Arena” if you’d rather listen than read.

“There’s two things you need to know about this place,” I told Fritz Godard when he pulled up in my weed-choked driveway a couple nights ago. “I got in way over my head when I bought this old place, and I cleaned today until I got bored, which was 12 minutes.”

It helps to say these things next to a Char-Griller with sweet oak and tangy mesquite smoke pouring out of it, and to follow it up with a cold pint. I figured I’d get a rapid buzz in this dude and the black grime on the kitchen baseboards would make him feel at ease and generally better about himself, if he noticed it at all.

I had two six-packs on ice: Avery Brewing’s White Rascal — I’ve always enjoyed having the Rascal around as temperatures climb — and Leinenkugel Berry Weiss. It seemed like a decent side bet, considering this was the year’s first string of cloudless high-70s days.

Beer and boardgames: The Hamm’s vintage beer goblets are broken out to celebrate Fritz’s safe arrival.

The taste of the Rascal reminded me I had two old friends in the house. I love nearly every Avery Brewing product I’ve ever had. White Rascal brought what I always remembered: suppleness while still being crisp, the orange zest playing along on the beer’s body like sundogs. These got crushed quickly as I taught Fritz how to run Project L, which I reviewed back in Episode 88.

Pivoting from that to the Leinenkugel Berry was the evening’s only disappointing turn: The whiff of orange that comes off a White Rascal is girded by an actual beer around it. These Leinies had a tinny ring of artificial-tasting berry and nothing else.

“It reminds me of what Vitamin Water tasted like in 2008, like they were trying to come up with something to compete with a boozy seltzer,” I said.

Learning Project L: Fritz ponders what to do with the nice base of pieces he’s acquired; he used them to nip me 21-20 in our second game.

“This is like what you give a niece or nephew who are having their first beer ever,” said Fritz.

The digitized berry startup sound that was the entirety of the beer’s personality stuck in my mouth for several minutes after, as if I’d been trance-eating SweetTarts or Spree while watching schlock on YouTube.

I dislike this beer intensely. I’d reach for a Keystone Light before I’d ever open one of these again. It is an annoying beverage. Know what sounds like Berry Weiss? Bari Weiss, which is also trash.

This was when Fritz’s time bartending and being a semipro lush in Louisville, Kentucky paid off. After pouring, trying, and touring his way through bottles, shelves and vats of brown liquors made in the Southeastern U.S., he pulled his favorite from that era of his life out of a brown paper bag: a bottle of Michter’s Rye.

The first belt of that Michter’s after that candy nothing beer, the reopening of the senses, was akin to the relief of being in a room where somebody is blasting anime theme music over a phone speaker for 20 minutes and you don’t realize your body’s been slowly tensing up in rage, but all of a sudden it stops because somebody else just drowned it out by throwing on some vinyl, maybe MC5 or Thin Lizzy.

Fritz said Michter’s became his go-to for its blend of bite and smoothness. And it was all there, that sharp, woody, upfront first hit, then a layered mellowness across the middle and back.

We knocked it back neat the rest of the night, stopping only to savage the half chicken and pickled okra I dropped between us on a cutting board, popping out back occasionally to watch the progress of a full moon and let the chill spring breeze from the south rake surplus heat off our boozy faces.

I showed him the ropes on Final Girl: Madness in the Dark before we succumbed to the ranks of unmedicated maniacs on the asylum map and passed out, him on the eastern couch, me on the southern couch, all the lights killed except, the orange accent strips on the floor beneath the couches, all sounds cut except the brisk tenor of the narrator. I’d thrown on an audiobook of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World. The rhythm of the words made drunkard’s hammocks in the middle of the book’s sweltering post-apocalyptic lagoons.

Damage report: 1.75 six packs, a chicken, most of a fifth of rye and several residential patients of Wolfe Asylum were destroyed in the making of this session.

I woke up several chapters later, Fritz’s eastern couch vacated, the moon and its jamboree mass having pulled with it in its western plummet the last strains of fight songs from fabled bandit enclaves in Brooklyn, the sun arrived to police chicken bones, the drying husks of night-bloom playlists, shot glasses, dice and the many yellow victim meeples from Final Girl that didn’t survive the second, deadlier night inside Wolfe Asylum.