My love affair with Becherovka began in Prague, in the summer of 1994, when the afterglow of the Velvet Revolution was still investing the particulate matter in the polluted air with a glittery fairy-dust sparkle. I'd come for a month to teach and to write about the city of Mozart and Kafka, and I was living with my family on a desolate, romantic edge of town, surrounded by decaying diplomatic villas, bordering the lunar landscape of an abandoned-looking technical university, and under the shadow of a grim, high-rise Soviet-era hotel, where, it was rumored, KGB agents had tossed recalcitrant guests from the upper windows. The streetlights had a sensor system that had been installed backward so that the lights blazed constantly but blinked out as you approached them.
One night, I was invited to give a reading at the Globe Bookstore, then a center for the arty expatriates and the yuppie entrepreneurs drawn to the city by its beauty, by its inexpensive apartments, and by the Wild West atmosphere of its position on the frontier between the past and the future. Some kind soul, imagining that I might be nervous about reading, suggested that I fortify myself with a drink of a special Czech liqueur.
A shot glass of syrupy, honey-colored liquid arrived at my table. I took a sip, then another. It was like drinking liquid gold, or perhaps I only thought so because the effect of Becherovka is not only euphoric but also slightly psychedelic. By the time I went up to the podium to read, a Becherovka-tinted light suffused the room, crowning each member of the audience with an individual halo. It struck me that I had never before seen such beautiful, interesting, charming people. In the first blush of my passion for Becherovka, I realized, beyond any doubt, that I had never been so wildly, so profoundly happy, and already I regretted all the glum, wasted hours of my pre-Becherovka life.
Among Becherovka's many charms are the beauty and oddness of its self-presentation. It comes in a tall, flat, dark green bottle, banded with a label emblazoned in primary colors, and marked with a mysterious red seal. Everything about the extremely old-fashioned packaging exudes a sort of Imperial Hapsburg aura, and goes along with the delightful paradox of an eighty-proof beverage doing a convincing impersonation of the sort of health tonic that might be prescribed for dyspepsia or sluggish blood or some other arcane diagnosis that exists only in Eastern Europe.