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BY TARAS GRESCOE | It drove Baudelaire to Belgium, then to an early grave; it left Paul Verlaine a hollow-eyed wreck, wandering from bar to bar in Paris' Latin Quarter accompanied by a misshapen shoeshine boy named Bibi-la-Purée. The deaths of Vincent Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde and poet Alfred de Musset were hastened by their inordinate love for this poison, long-since banned by the thinking men of all civilized nations. Except, of course, in death-defying, devil-may-care Spain, where 136-proof absinthe is about as common as orange Fanta. I'd come to Europe determined to uncork the liquid muse of the avant garde, the licorice-flavored, high-octane herbal alcohol popularized by a French doctor in 1792. I'd discovered that in the nation of his birth, absinthe's sale had been strictly prohibited since World War I, but that in Spain, absinthe is considered just another aperitif, as familiar as vermouth and Campari. I'd found what the Spanish call Absenta in liquor stores in Madrid and in just about every bar in Catalonia; hell, I'd even found liter bottles of the stuff in the window of Can Canesa, the great grilled sandwich shop in Barcelona's Plaça Sant Jaume. And now I was in Barcelona's Barrio Chino -- the infamous warren of narrow streets where Jean Genet set "A Thief's Journal" and the Divine Dalí went slumming -- finally face to face with my own glass of La Fée Verte, the 19th century hallucinogen that, in its time, had ruined more lives than cocaine. To tell the truth, I had been a little worried about my date with the Green Fairy. Before my trip, the only two people I'd met who'd actually tried absinthe -- both mild-mannered Canadians -- had gotten into fistfights after only a couple of glasses of the stuff. With this in mind, I'd chosen my drinking companions carefully: Mary, a Scottish painter who'd fallen in love with Barcelona in the '80s and stayed on through the booming '90s, and Henri, a gaunt Belgian pastrymaker with the sideburns of a rockabilly singer from Memphis. He'd left Ghent only two days before, using a Renault truck to transport 55-pound blocks of chocolate across France at a top speed of about 45 miles per hour, to fulfill his longtime dream of becoming the first trufflemaker for the sugar-loving citizens of Barcelona. As drinking partners, Mary and Henri may not have been Sarah Bernhardt and Arthur Rimbaud, but they had forged their friendship over countless glasses of absinthe, and knew its rituals. What's more, under their tutelage, I was pretty sure that I wouldn't finish the night in jail. We had started the evening at midnight (this being Spain, after all) in the Bar Marsella, which, though recently purchased by two hefty Anglo-Saxons, has been preserved intact as a kind of monument to the fast-fading bohemia of the Barrio Chino. In the Marsella, yellowing posters for long-forgotten aperitifs curl on the walls, the paint peels suggestively and half-a-dozen different tile patterns jockey for space on the undulating floor. A young waiter had brought us small brandy glasses full of clear, oily-looking absinthe, along with all the attendant paraphernalia: a bottle of water, paper-wrapped lumps of sugar and a three-tined trowel. In the classic version, one sets the trowel on the rim of the glass and slowly strains the water through the sugar cube into the absinthe until it dissolves. (Water wasn't the only mixer for absinthe, however: Singer Aristide Bruant drank it with red wine, and Edgar Allen Poe took his with brandy. And died, incidentally, at the age of 40 of a heart attack after a prolonged drinking binge.) Mary introduces me to a local variation: I allow a sugar cube, squeezed between forefinger and thumb, to soak up the absinthe, which is 68 percent alcohol. Then, placing the cube on the trowel, I light it on fire until the alcohol burns off. After stirring the dissolving cube into the absinthe, I fill the glass three-quarters full with water, provoking a remarkable transformation. The liquid turns milky green -- a color Oscar Wilde described as opaline, though to my eyes it looks more like a happy marriage of crème de menthe and whipped cream. In the murky half-light of the Bar Marsella, my glass of absinthe appears to be glowing from within. N E X T+P A G E | A remarkably sinister drink