Four to six was dead. Everyone at the beach or washing sand off their feet, tugging down the edge of a swimsuit to inspect tan progress. Nick was making batter in the back, and NP and Meg and I took turns with the few late-afternoon stragglers. I hadn't eaten all day, so I made lunch—a chocolate milk shake, heavy on the syrup. There was a hot-dog machine on-site, where the franks spun eternally like grisly grim planets, and occasionally I'd make a wretched feast of one, and every so often I'd grab a slice of pizza from Conca D'Oro or a burger from the Corner Bar, but most of the time I ate ice cream. Chocolate in a plastic cup with rainbow sprinkles, chocolate milk shakes, chocolate ice-cream sodas, chocolate twist dispensed by a lever into wavy, brown, short-lived peaks. I mean, it was free, and all you can eat, without limit, and it was nice to live like a glutton for a change, unchecked and unreserved. It was new for me. I was nauseous at the end of each day but that seemed a small price, and by the next shift I magically forgot how sick I'd been and started all over again.
“Your shirt smells kinda funky, Benji,” NP said.
“Yeah, I forgot to wash it.” I sneaked a peek at Meg. She was frowning at her fingernails, oblivious.
“Smells like … smells like …” As NP reached for the appropriate analogy, Bert staggered out front and put Nick on waffle duty.
“Dag,” Nick said.
“Better to get it now, than when all those people out there staring at you,” I said.
“Smells like the Funk of Forty Thousand Years,” NP said, finally.
I have not described the making of the waffle cones, I know. I've been putting it off. There was a bit of theater involved. “Look at what he's doing, Mommy!” You sat on a special perch in the front of the store for all to ogle as you ladled batter onto the four waffle grills, which were mounted together on a wheel. Spin the wheel, remove the cone, roll it up in the mold, spray on the nonstick cooking spray, add more batter, spin the wheel, and on to the next. “I want one, Mommy!” Sound easy? Go fuck yourself. Move too fast and the cones peeled off limp and useless, move too slow and they turned out as brittle as ashes and disintegrated at a glance. We wore thick gloves but often burned our forearms on the grills, hence the beat-up tube of vitamin-E ointment to prevent scarring, never far from reach. When the batter overflowed, squeezed out when the grill top came down, we scraped off the stalactites of batter with a paint scraper. Is a paint scraper a standard food-preparation utensil? You had become a living advertisement for the waffle cone, a cog in a Belgian dessert combine. “Smells so good!” The hungry ones watched your every move, a grubby mob eager for this spectacle.
The human epidermis is a wondrous thing. When you pulled waffle duty, a Plexiglas barrier separated you from the hordes, and this was no small boon, especially during the weekend rushes. By the end of the night, the accumulated swabbed-on oils from untold foreheads and forearms and hands covered the glass so thoroughly that our oppressors were lost in the fog of their own plenitude. “If I cannot see their faces, I will not have the nightmares,” I whispered to myself, as steam puffed out from the sizzling grills: Windex by the crate, you can imagine.
A tall man in a Hawaiian shirt came in, his face so red and peeling that he must have had sunburns on his sunburns. It was beginning, Thursday night in all its humanity. At the start of the shift, we played You're Up, trading off customers until the numbers made it impossible.
“All yours, Benji,” Meg said, looking up from that week's
Dan's Papers
. She was deep in the club pages, reconnoitering the weekend.
“Why am I up? You just got here.”
“I'm taking my break,” she said.
“Huh?”
“I'm taking my break at the start of the shift,” Meg said. “What? There's no law against it.”
I looked at the customer and knew he was one of those Rum Raisin Imbeciles. Of course over time you got to know what people were going to order as soon as they walked in the door—the inner was written on the outer. Rum Raisin Imbeciles looked like they were wilting. They had a distinctive sag to their postures, their faces slack and loose, as if their day-to-day had drained away something essential. One bite of Rum Raisin, though, and they instantly perked up, standing up straight, eyes a-sparkle. It was weird.
He took a number even though he was the only customer in the store. I waited for him to speak. Rum Raisin Imbeciles always made a show of considering other flavors—cooing “Oh, that looks good” and “I've been meaning to try that”—before settling on their favorite, the polyester of ice cream. Innovative in its time, perhaps, Rum Raisin was loud plaid shorts next to a fresh can of Double Mocha Bombasta.
“Rum Raisin, please.”
“In a waffle cone?” I asked in a pleasant chirp. Martine wanted us to push the waffle. At the peak of a rush, our collective
In a waffle cone?s
trilled throughout the store like beautiful chimes.
“I've been meaning to try one of those …”
I exhaled with impatience. I knew where this was going.
“A sugar cone is fine.”
I started scooping. One nice thing about Rum Raisin, it was soft. Especially after it had been in the vats for a while. A new container fresh out of the freezer was a horror. All you could scrape out were these tiny ribbons that made it look like you were peeling a carrot while parents lifted their whelps up to the vats so they could see us working away, the kids' noses dragging greasy smears across the
glass. The shavings added up over time, but with those beady little eyes hawking you it was a real hassle.
I rang him up and he left the store, newly energized and licking thoughtfully. My shake had melted so I poured it out and made a chocolate ice-cream float, easy on the seltzer. Time disappeared into the service-industry void. You looked at the clock and saw twenty minutes had passed. What happened? I saw NP mashing some Oreo into a pint cup. He noticed me and said, “My mom wants some for this weekend.”
“Didn't you get a pint yesterday?” Which was true. Mrs. Collins's Rocky Road requests weighing on my mind, I took note of my friends' pint-making habits in hopes of figuring a way out of my problem.
“Dag, Benji. What are you, the Jonni Waffle police?”
I had a thing about stealing. I discovered this in fifth grade, the first time my white classmates started their daily swiping runs through the candy racks of the Gristedes next to school. Andy palmed a roll of Mint Certs and winked. I stood behind him with a grape Fruit Roll-Up I intended to pay for, according to social norms. He whispered, “Take something, man,” but before I could even think about it, I heard Sidney Poitier's voice in my head and in that crisp, familiar, so-dignified tone, he declared, “They think we steal, and because they think we steal, we must not steal.”
Andy paid for his sour pickle, the ill-gotten Certs secure in his coat pocket. I paid for my Fruit Roll-Up, half intoxicated with a new self-righteousness. The next couple of years, I shook my head in disapproval when one of my friends stole something. I spent my allowance on Starbursts and Jolly Ranchers, legit all the way.
Stealing, Sidney Poitier said, was for the white kids. Let them pull their petty crimes if they wanted—we were made of better material. There was no real harm in it, ripping off a candy bar or box of cough drops here and there unless, and everyone agreed on this point, you were one of the miserable, anonymous Klepto Kids, those unfortunate souls who channeled their home-turf dysfunction into schooltime acting out, rummaging through people's coats during
recess, shaking down unsecured lockers at key moments of opportunity. (Bettina, Bettina.) It was easy to picture the forbidden troves underneath the Klepto Kid beds, twenty floors above Park Avenue—the shiny mound of Timex watches, Fiorucci sunglasses, electronic calculators, and bracelets engraved with the names of happier children.
So it went until high school, when the rules changed, as usual. Now the good boys of my Sag Harbor crew pulled the occasional crime—smuggling a Budweiser out of the South Hampton 7-Eleven under a sweatshirt, sticking a
Penthouse
into a copy of
OMNI
for camouflage and walking out of the Ideal. I abstained, and Sidney Poitier, observing my peers' thievery, kept silent, merely clucking his tongue occasionally. I had only tried to steal something once. And I had learned my lesson.
THE GREAT COCA-COLA ROBBERY
occurred in the spring of 1985, when I found myself in that most unlikely place, a party. I'd run into Bobby one afternoon at Tower Records on Sixty-sixth Street. I was looking for a Depeche Mode twelve-inch; he was down from Scars-dale to buy U.T.F.O.'s debut album. We rarely saw each other during the school year, but quickly picked things up again as if we'd ridden through the Hills the day before. As we were about to split, I removed all tagalong/mooch emanations from my voice and asked what he was up to that night. He said, “Going to a party. Wanna come?” And maybe that was a kind of theft, because with the finesse of picking a pocket I'd spared myself a night at home watching cable.
The party was a few blocks away from my house, on Ninety-eighth off West End Avenue. Bobby went to a prep school in River-dale that had a mix of city kids and Westchester kids. I met up with him in front of the McDonald's outside the subway. “Karen's parents fly away every weekend,” Bobby told me, “so she has a lot of parties.” I pictured weekend after weekend of parties, Friday to Sunday bacchanals where kids smoked weed and drank beer in full Kid with
the Empty House liberation, a notion reinforced when we walked in and saw everyone lounging on couches, or leaning against walls in mellow affect. It seemed they had been there for days in a perfect habitat of cool poise. Bobby introduced me around, and I was greeted with genuine, nonjudgmental interest. New York private schools all drew from the same pool of well-scrubbed scion, but these people seemed nicer than the reliably dismissive brand at my school, like they'd make space for my tray and scooch over if I walked by their lunch table, or make fun of my clothes in a way that said, We're close enough that my joking reveals our human connection, as opposed to, You're a jerk and I'm an asshole. I thought to myself, I could get used to this. I went to look for a beer, and there I stumbled on the Fort Knox of carbonated beverages.
A few weeks earlier, the Coca-Cola Company had discontinued their signature cola. They'd lost market share to Pepsi. Diet Coke, the sister brand, had been too successful, luring away consumers with the promise of thinner thighs, a figure more in line with that Aerobicized You. The higher-ups hit upon a catastrophic solution. They decided to replace the most famous drink in the world with an impostor.
I had been addicted to Coke for years, with a two-or three-can-a-day habit since the fifth grade, starting around the same time my schoolmates started stealing, now that I think about it. When my sister told me not to be so hyper, or my parents told me to knock it off, I vibrated with the strain of keeping still, and wondered why nature had cursed me so—it wasn't until I was in high school that I learned what caffeine was. My love for Coke went beyond mere buzz, however. How could one not be charmed by the effervescent joviality of a tall glass of the stuff—the manic activity of the bubbles, popping, reforming, popping anew, sliding up the inside of the glass to freedom, as if the beverage were actually, miraculously,
caffeinated on itself
. That tart first sip, preferably with ice knocking against the lips for an added sensory flourish, that stunned the brain into total recall of pleasure, of all the Cokes consumed before and all those impending Cokes, the long line of satisfaction underpinning a life. What
forgiveness for the supreme disappointment of a fountain Coke that turned out to be fizzless and dead, or a lukewarm Coke that had been sitting for a while, falling away from its ideal temperature of 46.5 degrees Fahrenheit/8 degrees Celsius, all the bubbles fled, so that it had become a useless mud of sugar. Which is what New Coke tasted like, actually.
I remember when I first heard that they were changing the formula. April 23, 1985. It was dinnertime and I'd wandered into the living room to ask my mother a question—I can't remember what it was, as it was erased by the terrible information. Dinnertime custom had Reggie and me eating in his room before an array of sitcoms, the
M*A*S*Hs
, the '
KRP
s, while our parents ate in the living room watching the evening news. (I moved into my sister's room when she went to college, but Reggie got to keep the TV after a series of negotiations too Byzantine to go into, higher-level even-Stephen stuff beyond mortal ken.) I walked in just in time to hear the newscaster say, “A surprising announcement about an American classic.” Somehow I knew. I stayed through the commercial break and watched as Roberto Goizueta, the CEO of Coca-Cola, cheered the end of the world. It was inconceivable, like tampering with the laws of nature. Hey, let's try Gravity-Free Tuesdays, buckle up, motherfuckers. From this day on, water is incredibly flammable, see how that goes. I slunk back to my room, dizzy and confused. It was as if someone had popped the top of the world, and let all the air out.
Within days, I'd cornered the local market on Old Coke in a grid defined by 106th Street to the north, Ninety-sixth to the south, and from Amsterdam to the river, buying up what I could from the corner bodegas, the increasingly slick delis popping up on Broadway, and the assorted stationery stores of the 'hood. By the time New Coke started to appear, a few days after the announcement, I was well prepared, with a huge stash in my closet, a prayer against Doomsday. (A secret stash, Klepto-style.) I had no dreams of profiteering, of selling my stock at a dear price to aficionados when the day came that the people of Earth discovered the treasure they had destroyed, as if the cola were an exquisite lizard or spiny bivalve
driven to extinction in our race's savage drive to ruin. No. I wanted it all to myself, like an art thief who steals
Nude Descending a Staircase
or some key Picasso and hangs it on the wall of his own private gallery, for his wicked and ingrown pleasure, at peace with the fact that the world is unaware of his activities, and perhaps that is actually the point of the entire exercise—although such a sentiment is probably not too surprising coming from a boy whose main recreation was masturbation.