When I was a kid, after a long day, my Dad would get a bottle out of the fridge and pour it into a glass. If the chosen glass was short enough, I would get to drink the last of the unable to be poured into the glass portion from the bottle. It burned my throat a little bit, but I liked it.
Fast forward 35 years or so. I’m hooked on it. I’m drinking one in the morning, usually before my breakfast of beef jerky. It’s cold and the throat stinging sensation reminds me of a by-gone time.
I don’t always have one for lunch, but during the workday at some point, I go over to the store and buy one to drink in the car. It never gets warm. It never lasts that long. Sometimes it’s a two-drinker…gone in two drinks. Cans only. The bottles don’t keep it as cold. I even liked the clear version.
We never keep it in the house, because the kids have no idea what it is yet and we aren’t going to tell them until they ask us about it. Also, it keeps me from drinking two or three a night.
I check into getting a machine that would dispense it installed at work. No one suggests an intervention, but that’s because I keep this addiction to myself. But while it is an addiction, I have no incidents of missing work, having problems at home or going on a crime spree to support my habit.
I make an acquaintance of someone who sells it for a living. I make friends with him, his wife and children with hopes of somehow defraying the expense of what has become a $3 a day monkey on my back.
And then, suddenly, he is no longer working there. In loyalty, I resolve to never buy one again. However, my life goes into a tailspin as I am forced to go “cold turkey.” I hang out at Maxwell’s, hoping someone will drop a can from their shopping cart as they go out to their car. I climb into dumpsters hoping a can has fallen upright still containing the life-giving elixir with carmel color and extra fizziness.
Distracted, I mentioned it in one of my columns. My sponsor calls me and accuses me of “falling off the wagon.”
I’m not made of stone, I tell my sponsor, I’m not made of stone.
And I wish I could substitute something else, but as I learned in 1995 during their national campaign, “Nothing else is a Pepsi.”
