When I was a lad there were two blind-pigs within three blocks. On occasion my grandfather would avail himself of their wares. I am not quite sure how the numbers for the places got around. He knew of a few others but they were miles away near the race track. (Ad, you may recall Belmont, but we lived near Verdun.) There was another in The Pointe and a few in Ville Emard, but the Ville Emard places had mostly wine and ya took your chances on that. A new fellow started in business, but his hootch (I don't know what else to call it because it bore no likeness to anything I'd ever had until that time in my life and he made lots of people sick with his product) quickly gained a bad rep and that was it for him. Some of the more organized guys would put stuff in a cab, but that involved pre-arranged payment and you paid the cab. This was before the days of credit cards, and as with so much else back then, if you didn't know the people involved it was likely gonna be a dry Sunday. However, even then it was never more than two or three phone calls and usually something could be arranged. I called The Oratory one late Saturday night and almost had the guy who answered the phone convinced that we needed a case of wine for our Sunday service but some assh#le at the party started laughing and that deal went down in flames. Then there was Dave in Old Montreal who always carried some extra, but his deal was that you had to drink it there after a $5.00 cover charge and because it involved taxis, a few blocks walk (so as to stop the curious from knowing exactly where one was going when ya were supposed to be in church) and then the same on the return leg, his place was a bit of a chore. I stopped doing that stuff when I turned sixteen.

On one particularly dry day in Windsor we got into a gang of left-over alcohol: scotch, gin, vodka, wines and some beer. BIG pot on the stove, pour in the remnants. Float a bowl in the alcohol. Turn the lid upside down fill it with icecubes. Cook the alcohol off. It would condense when it hit the lid and drip into the bowl. Never did get a great clarity. Incidentally, we're damned lucky we didn't burn the house down.