Templeton Goodfellow

by Steve Wiley

Name’s Templeton Goodfellow, secret inventor of limoncello in what was my finest hour. It was the Tuscan Princess Maria Maddalena de’ Medici helped me form the lemony concoction. She had the most beautiful ghost that will ever be, but her story is from a different time. This story is about Malort Swedish Liquor, and how that came to be flavored in Chicago.

I’m sure you don’t know me. My brother Robin, on the other hand, you might. He goes by Puck, the smug fuck. Shakespeare quoted him on a midsummer’s eve, “Thou speak’st aright; I am that merry wanderer of the night.”

Merry wanderer indeed! He wandered into a mousetrap in the East End during the Great Plague of London. Since the accident, he’s been paralyzed from the nipples down, bedridden at my Aunt’s flat in Stratford-upon-Avon.

I’m an Elf, but not like these frauds you see in the movies with their fine silver hair, like harp string. I’m three inches tall with ratty hair and skin that looks its age – roughly ten thousand years old. I’ve been jaundiced for most of the last century as a result of my late stage alcoholism, so my skin has a constant piss-colored hue.

I deposit spirits in spirits for a day job. Let me explain how that works.

When any liquor is produced for the first time, there is one step in the process you haven’t been aware of until now. This hidden step has to do with the allocation of a spirit, soul, ghost, etc. to the liquor itself. After fermentation, it’s my job to complete this step, by guiding (sometimes forcing) the chosen spirit into the alcohol. The spirit provides the real flavor.

The finest liquors hold the most beautiful souls. As I said, limoncello would not exist without Maria Maddalena de’ Medici. Joan of Arc was responsible for Dom Ruinart Champagne. The first true grappa was made with Caravaggio’s spirit after I encountered it, overserved on port wine in a port bar near Genoa.

As fine liquors tend to house great souls, so the most repulsive liquors cage reprehensible ones. Stroh’s tastes like Adolf Eichmann’s soul would, because his soul is a primary ingredient. You can thank Stalin for smoked salmon vodka. After Vlad Dracula was executed, I bound his ghost and deposited it into a jar of beet wine so rancid it has not been tasted for 500 years.

Then there’s Malort.

Malort originally contained a Swiss-Irish serial rapist by the name of Otto O’Malley. I changed old Otto out when Malort gained notoriety in Chicago. The Midwest never suited him. He was fittingly replaced with a notorious dago, Alphonse Gabriel Capone.

Capone was a rare case in that he forfeited his spirit before his eventual death in Alcatraz. It happened on the night of the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, the day Capone ordered the execution of nine North Side Irish gang members in a Lincoln Park alley.

On that night, Capone occupied his usual corner booth at his favorite watering hole, the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge. I sat fortuitously near him at the end of the bar. He was with a little lava lamp-shaped Sicilian girl. I was stag, as I generally am; heavily drunk, as I generally am.

At the exact point in time when the massacre was carried out, Capone’s soul was expelled from his body, a natural consequence of such a horrendous act.

Taking advantage of my close proximity, I leapt from my stool and gave the thing a mighty thump on the skull, rendering it totally unconscious. Knowing it would violently resist as soon as it awoke, I had little choice but to force it into the nearest bottle I could find, which happened to be Malort. I stuffed him into the bottle and there he swims forever.

I suppose I ended up drinking a bottle of Malort myself that night, mostly out of curiosity. Stuff turned out worse than I thought it would. My mouth reeked of battery acid for months afterward. I remember thinking how ironic it was that one of the most successful bootleggers in history ended up bootlegged himself. Reminded me of the richest Roman, Marcus Crassus, getting Molten Gold poured down his throat by the Parthians. Try Barefoot Bubbly, it has Crassus in it.

When I left the Green Mill, I strolled down Lawrence Avenue to the lakeshore as I tend to do when feeling especially depressed. Near Montrose Beach there is an odd sand dune that never accumulates snow. Within that dune I hide the finest limoncello, and of course Maria Maddalena de’ Medici. I dug up a bottle, opened it, and sang a song to Maria that she had last heard centuries ago when we she first discovered me in the weeds, the tiny princess she was, blowing the bulbs off white dandelions for fun.

Play with me Maria
I’ve got sangria
In the slit of me knickers

I heard her laugh within the bottle. She sounded like the Mediterranean in a seashell.

Steve Wiley is a writer and managerial consultant (yawn), who has lived throughout Chicagoland the past thirty years. Most of his past publications have all been of the non-fiction Treasury Management genre (extreme yawn). Steve does publish short stories, specifically related to alternative Chicago history and urban fantasy. Steve holds a masters degree in something business related from DePaul University and an undergraduate degree in something else from Illinois State University.