The Weekly Screed (#594)

Love song inspired by a five-dollar Coke
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — Last month, I was lolling around a Paris café, drinking a five-dollar Coke…

I’d been running errands. I was clammy and weary. Nothing appealed to my thirst at that moment more than a Coke, especially since French cafés have, at long last, figured out how serve a Coke. I mean, they still give you that supercilious slice of lemon but nowadays, they keep their Coca-Cola supply in a refrigerator and De Gaulle’s national ice-cube rationing program has finally ended. You get more than one cube now.

Over the years, I’ve developed the ability to drink almost any potable fluid. But I retain my childhood attachment to Coke as the perfect antidote to (really) hot and (painfully) thirsty. I trace this pathological Coke bond back to the hottest summer of my youth, the year I substituted for Freddy Poss on his Lacrosse Tribune paper route.

Freddy was an eager beaver — especially when it came to his paper route. While other kids were swimming, fishing, playing ball or crawling under the fence to get into the County Fair, Freddy was going door-to-door, from the south end of town all the way out to the VA Hospital, buttonholing housewives and singing the praises of the daily Lacrosse Tribune. Freddy had the biggest paper route in town, a great, twisting anaconda traversing the alleys and byways of Tomah, Wisconsin, starting up south of the Creamery, wandering east and shifting west, veering north past the municipal swimming pool (where you could hear the happy screams of cool kids neck-deep in mouthwash-blue water), and then just going on and on —more than 120 daily customers, most of whom Freddy, a born salesman, had promised not merely a Tribune on the doorstep or in the bushes, but a Tribune tucked, by hand, right under their mailbox.

Freddy’s family went on vacation in the dead-dog heatstroke-humid depths of August’s two most infernal weeks. During that period in my twelfth summer, I took over Freddy’s route. At that stage in my growth, I hadn’t actually grown much — leaving me significantly outweighed by 120 copies of the Lacrosse Tribune, which I had to balance in a comically huge wire basket mounted on the front axle of my Montgomery-Ward one-speed bicycle. Steering with this burden cantilevered out-front was a little like trying to balance a wheelbarrow full of yearling hogs on a railroad track. But after 20 or 30 crashes, a mild concussion, a pair of jeans mangled beyond repair, an elbow that will never be the same and a blood trail that stretched pretty much from Elizabeth Street to Izzy Cooper’s junkyard, I got the hang of it.

On a cool fall day, Freddy’s paper route might have almost seemed like a pleasant excursion through town. But in the greasy heat of deepest August, as I fought tooth-and nail with a cubic yard of newsprint, it was a solitary ordeal that strained my every fiber and drenched me with sweat ‘til my sneakers squinched and my t-shirt dripped. It had only three redeeming features. One was that the farther I went, the lighter my load.

My second consolation was Jesus — sort of. As a rising star among the altar boys of St. Mary’s, I knew that that agony was good for my soul and I could offer my bruises and my blistered neck up to to the Son of God. I honestly meant to do this. But, when you’re hauling Freddy Poss’s 120 Tribunes through the bowels of Hell, your brain is boiling, your armpits are chafing, your throat is drier than a tyrannosaurus turd, and then out from behind a garage on Kilbourn Avenue comes a raging Rottweiler trailing his chain and regarding your left leg as a late lunch, well, Jesus indeed! Stopping along the way for a quick rosary isn’t something that pops right to mind.

However, every afternoon, with about 18 papers left, I reached a little general store on North Glendale, across from the baseball fields. By the time I got there, I was stickier than a two-year-old with an all-day sucker. The heat had reamed out my throat with a rat-tail file. I parked the bike and staggered inside. The little grocery was dark and cool and the old guy behind the counter had friendly eyes like my grandfather.

I dug out a dime, the same price as a comic book and hard to give up, because I was addicted to Superman, and Archie & Jughead, Pogo, L’il Abner, Joe Btfsplk, Scrooge McDuck, Sgt. Rock and Turok, Son of Stone. But here was a dime in a good cause.

The pop cooler was a thick-walled red cabinet bearing a Coca-Cola logo and the grinning visage of a boyish elf with a bottlecap for a hat. You opened the lid and found, inside, dozens of bottles hanging by their necks on steel rails in a black pool of icy water. All you could see were bottle-caps. Most said “Coke,” but there were a few Seven-Ups, some Nehis and Sun-Drop Golden Colas. But I needed a Coke and I needed it bad.

You got your Coke by working a bottle along the rails to a little gate. To open its jaws, you fed the cooler your dime. Then came a click. The jaws were open. Here was the life-or-death moment. You had to be decisive. Coolers like these were cranky. You couldn’t nudge or coax your Coke through its iron jaws. Worst of all, you couldn’t stop halfway. If you did, a second click would resound throughout the little store, announcing that the lock had closed with your Coke still between its rails, behind the gate. Gone.

So, you had to grab hard and yank it clear. And when you did, oh, sweet Jesus! It dribbled water so cold it numbed your fingers. And you fumbled to lean the cap against the bottle opener. The sound of the Coke, set free, was a clink and a sigh.

Then, with one hand on the cooler and the other around the neck of my Coke, as the old counterman gazed appreciatively, I’d plant the bottle on my parched mouth, wrap my skinny lips and point it toward the ceiling. I squeezed my eyes shut as a caustic flood of arctic acid and boiling carbonation went through my diaphragm like a bayonet. It gripped my body, hammered my senses and sent tears streaming into my ears.

That first voracious gulp nearly emptied the bottle. I emerged from the assault woozy — my throat vibrating like a high-tension wire, a film of torched sugar on my tongue — but more gratified, more relieved, more awed by the power of chemistry to alter one’s state of being than I have ever felt since.

Nowadays, I drink Coke sparingly. Never keep it in the fridge. And when I indulge, like that five-dollar French “Coca” with a gratuitous lemon twist, I drink to Freddy.