A few months prior, after a fair amount of persuasion, Cal had agreed to show me how he produced his product. Acknowledging his tentativeness, I had assured him I intended to stay in the Canadian Club business long-term and wasn't coming for his backwoods brand. I’d watched as he’d pulled a soup pot, coil, and saucepan out of the bottom of the closet and then laid on his belly on the floor beside his bed to remove four bricks, two wrenches, a hose and a big bag of flour from underneath it. I was in awe that his small room held so many items and mesmerized by him, taken by how proud he was as he explained the process.

“I drilled a hole in the lid and inserted this coupler,” he told me, pointing to the piece. “Now, all I need to do is attach the coil, loop it into this saucepan, secure the hose to the faucet and drop the other end in here to collect the condensate. It’s important to drain the hose when it gets too hot and then insert it again.”

“I could go somewhere with that statement,” I teased, drawing a laugh from the already giddy Cal.

He’d told me he used to use birdfeed back in Georgia but had started using corn when he moved to Chicago. Running back to his room to get a container of fermenting mash he’d mixed a few days before from under a pile of strategically placed clothes, he held it out for me to sniff, and I was enchanted by the sweetness of the scent, relating it to the candied quality stuck to Cal’s skin that I’d struggled to identify until that day.

“Now we have to make flour putty,” Cal said, mixing the white powder with water until it was a lump of mortar, which he applied to the lid of the pot. “You need to make sure it’s secure or it’ll blow through the ceiling.”

“And that’s what the bricks are for,” I guessed, handing them to him one by one so he could place them on the top of the pot.

“You got it.” Cal smiled, and suddenly we’d become a team.

Later, we’d gotten bent on another one of his batches and barneymugged all night.

“There are some of your Towertown marjories,” Maks said, gesturing to the men I’d homed in on moments before.

As Cal and Rosie approached, I wished I was an innovator myself, who could invent a way to push them back with my mind, compel them to retreat. Being a mere mortal, I said cool ‘hellos’ and introduced Cal and Rosie, who was clad in men’s clothes and lighter than usual makeup, to the rest of my group.