The Weekly Screed (#605)

How to drink a flavored 
Coke (if we ever could again)
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — Most people, if they’ve heard at all of Richmond, California, connect it with the inspirational Samuel L. Jackson basketball movie, “Coach Carter.” In the film, based on a real coach, Jackson kicks all his players out of practice — and games — in mid-season because they’re flunking all their classes. The movie, of course, has a happy ending. The city of Richmond, so far, doesn’t.

I’ve actually been to Richmond. It’s a brutally unfashionable town on the rusted fringe of Frisco Bay, built around a refinery and cloaked in a miasma of poisonous purple air. But it’s the sort of place the journalist in me loves, because of its harlequin mixture of peoples and races, its clashing neighborhoods and its sheer toughness.

Richmond’s diversity has enjoyed an uptick recently with a spillover of “Greens,” bleeding-hearts, vegans, poets, beatniks and fully-dilated do-gooders from neighboring Berkeley. After taking control of the city council, the newcomers contrived to humble Richmond’s biggest employer, spender, polluter and oppressor, Chevron. This Big Oil/small town conflict rages on, but lately it shares headlines with a fresh crusade.

In an effort to reduce childhood obesity, Richmond’s reformers have proposed a penny-per-ounce local tax on sugary soft drinks. They mean well, of course, but many of the city’s rank-and-file see it as a regressive tax that hurts the working poor more than either Big Soda or the bourgeois immigrants from Berkeley. Meanwhile, poplords like Coke and Pepsi have pumped $2.4 million into the anti-tax campaign.

It’s an interesting fight but, actually, I don’t care who wins — because both sides have it wrong. They lack imagination and have no sense of history. Nobody in this argument has paused to ask the question: “Hey, really, what is a drink for?”

The beauty of any meaningful libation — whether it’s Dr. Pepper, Remy Martin or boilermaker — lies in its quotidian ritualism, its power to turn the mundane act of hydration into a moment apart from the Hobbesian ordeal of survival, an interlude that invites aesthetic exaltation, epicurean introspection and social pleasure.

So, here’s my plan. Levy the pop tax, but apply it to a higher purpose. Use it to capitalize the revival of soda fountains — just like the one at Steele’s Rexall Drugs, where I used to hang with my mentor, Fat Vinny. If Richmond’s reformers pulled this off, then maybe, eventually… I mean, wouldn’t be cool if the only place you could go in town for a soda would be a soda fountain? Coca-Cola might once more arrive in the form of unmixed ingredients in aluminium kegs and might be served again — at long last — with an array of flavored syrups that range from cherry to chocolate to lemon and lime. 

I remember what that was like. Fat Vinny and I would settle onto a stool at Steele’s, and Vinny would order his “usual” — a cherry Coke. I always got vanilla.

Now. There’s an art to drinking a flavored Coke. The soda jerk — usually an 11th-grader from Tomah High working after school for gas money — would start by squirting the syrup into the bottom of your Coke glass. Next, ice — cubes, never crushed. Finally, the Coke, but not the watery brown stuff they sell nowadays. Fat Vinny and I drank old-school, high-octane, secret-formula Coca-Cola, preservative-free and perishable within 12 hours, delivered in the dead of night by an armed Brinks truck in the alley behind the drugstore, mixed scientifically at the soda fountain by a licensed pharmacist from pure water, mystery syrup and a shot of fizz so explosive it could put your eye out.

When the jerk set down my Coke, the flavoring was still congealed at the bottom of the chalice. My personal syrup-squirt — viscous and satiny, writhing like a restless ectoplasm and imbued with the still-undilute potency of vanilla extract (not that faint aftertaste you got from Sealtest’s New York ice cream) — was heavier than Coke, dense as a glob of mercury. It just sat down there, squirming sensuously when I turned my glass. It remains one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

Some kids made a big production of stirring their Coke furiously, to evenly distribute the flavor. This was wrong. These kids were dilettantes. For one thing, all this agitation compromised your carbonation. A good Coke tickled your nose, burned your uvula and made your eyes water. Stir it up too much and you’d kill your high.

Besides, you didn’t want that luscious puddle of syrup to disperse itself insipidly all through your cocktail. You wanted it to just barely eel and tendril here and there osmotically, like veins in marble, like rainbow strands of oil in water. I never troubled my Coke with more than two or three delicate turns of the straw, just enough to arouse my vanilla without corrupting its integrity. With its ill-blended nectars thus barely stirred, the experience of imbibing a vanilla Coke — the most toothsome drink ever known to any ten-year-old — was a capricious melange of shifting sensations. Some sips heavily evoked the redolent rain-forests of Madagascar, others were Coke-intense and throat-scorching, with barely a hint at the cohabitation of its flavors. Finally, at the very bottom, long delayed, an almost Cokeless scum of fluid vanilla, pungent and pagan, made for the last, yummiest, sinfullest upsuck.

Fat Vinny and I, connoisseurs of the flavored Coke, nursed our drinks at a leisurely William Powell/Myrna Loy pace. While we sipped and chatted, urbanely, Vinny often would cross his legs (not easy for a lardass on a revolving stool), light up a Camel and confide in me the latest unwholesome update on his so-called love life.

Now, imagine that we could restore this idyll by simply imposing a penny tariff on an ounce of Coke. Picture this scene — a lost tableau of a more innocent America — reappearing, rising from Norman Rockwell’s grave, in little Richmond, as the product of wise compromise between Big Soda and the Greenies on the city council.

If it worked, it could spread. And if it spread, soda fountains might start popping up everywhere, pushing Starbucks off the corner. A trip to Walgreen’s would no longer be a living hell. The return of the soda fountain might, best of all, give your kids a harmless but thrilling sensation that no American child under the age of 60 has ever experienced — the taste of a REAL cherry Coke.