OT OT I have never in my life had to chug a beer with a dead rat in it. My eating club (Campus) was relatively proletarian and we could never afford rats. Mice I have done.
As for Nehi, you bet I have. I hold that Nehi grape soda was second only to NuGrape in that delectable category, while Nehi orange soda was distinctly inferior to Orange Crush (of pre-1980 vintage) -- the one with ridgy brown bottles. If you poured Orange Crush into a clear glass, it was as pale as diabetic dog urine, with little bits of orange pulp in it. It certainly did not look delicious, which, I suspect, is why they concealed it in brown glass. The new Orange Crush tastes like diabetic dog urine. When cans replaced bottles, a subject I have dealt with at length elsewhere, people didn't want to drink anything that looked like and tasted like diabetic dog urine so it pretty much disappeared. Just another one of those delicacies of the past which have been destroyed by globalism, capitalism, liberalism, greed, and, who knows, the minimum wage. Other items that have disappeared from my purview are those white salted pistacchio nuts in tiny packages formerly sold in bars, Tom's Toasted Peanuts, Sunshine Chocolate Nugget Cookies, Chocolate milk drink packed in clear ridgy pop bottles (similar in form to Orange Crush bottles) and obtainable only in poverty-stricken Southern country stores or disreputable roadside filling stations where you had to slide the drink out of the cooler down iron slats, Dromedary Date-Nut Bread in cans, Moon Pies.
Here's a picture in my mind excited by the memories of food. ... A gang of 8 young shirtless muscular and athletic black men all above middle size, armed with sling blades, brush axes and hooks, brush saws, wearing old-style aluminum and felt military canteens and machetes (and snake bite and first aid kits -- for not a day would pass without a Southern diamond back or canebreak rattler, or a cotton mouth or copperhad being killed) on web belts, heavy high-laced boots and surplus utilities with bomb pockets on the side, some with bandanas wrapped around their heads others with bush hats or compressed paper surplus marine corps topees emerge from the pipeline right-of -way and head to the country store at the cross-roads just 50 yards from the pipeline. They are arguing and grumbling because lunch is going to come from this store, and they can't go in. They would have to go around the back, except that one of the black men is not black, the skin on his powerful torso is burned black walnut with hints of rosewood and mahogany (as Elsa Klensch would say), and when he takes off his sweat streaked dark glasses one might see that his eyes are a brilliant blue and he has a 12 guage shotgun pistol on his belt. As they walk they discuss what they want to eat, and arriving at the run-down unpainted store all set about with Coke, See Rock City, and Ruby Cave signs the white youth goes into the store and takes off his hat, his glaring near white brush cut makes the storekeeper relax, almost sigh, despite the brush-ax on his shoulder. He orders the complex meal -- two cans of sardines, a pound of rat cheese, a box of Malomars, a gallon of milk (four quarts), a NuGrape, a Pepsi, a pound of bologna, and one of liver sausage, a loaf of bread, two Delicia bars ( "yeah, those bars theah" (because no real 210 pound Georgia-born man can actually simper a soft "c" to pronounce the word "Delicia!" in the prescribed way).
The bill is $2.20, no sales tax in Georgia (although Alabama and Florida have 5 mils a dollar tokens and the waiter will collect $.30 cents from each man that night in town after he pays them their $2 dollar food allowance and their hotel chit before they go their separate ways to eat and sleep (paying only 10 cents for lunch himself.) The black men are or were football players at a little Georgia college historically (and exclusively) black). The white man goes to Princeton. The white man says to the wizened storekeeper that "We gonna sit out theah under the slash pine and eat and maybe take a nap. I'd be beholden to you if my men could use your restroom, otherwise we use the woods." He stands there with the money in his hand, the storekeeper packing food into a cut half of a cardboard box. "Okay. Don't make a mess." "Sure. You got a Constitution we could have to keep the chiggers off?" The old man nods and hands over the well-read newspaper. Generally, anything a 210 pound man over six feet with a brush hook on his shoulder va sans dire and seven bigger friends, while black, as well armed as he, will use the john. Actually, the last man to use the john will wipe it pretty good and leave it cleaner than before. The eight men share the food and drink and sit under the 30 ft high pines, spreading the morning's newspaper whose headlines describe the disaster in Korea. As they eat quickly and voraciously, chugging great gulps of milk, laughing and gorging, the talk turns from war to football and what Tech and Georgia (schools that all but one of them cannot attend) will do this year. It is June of 1950. And as they read and eat, they little know that they -- all of them -- will be at war very soon. As they finish, they spread the newspapers on the sparse grass and pine needles on the ground, carefully crimping the paper sheets together in a futile attempt to defeat the mites. The white man takes out a bag of powdered sulfur and sprinkles it on the paper and hands the bag around to the others.
He lies down on his back, his arms folded behind his head. The flies drown themselves in his generous sweat. He looks up at the sun twinkling through the sparse canopy, and as he falls asleep, he ponders how his country and he will do in the coming war. |
