It's all in the mix
A couple of weekends ago one of my nephews asked me to explain what "mix" is after I recounted a story from the days when if you missed the bank closing at 5 on a Friday (two hours later than the rest of the week) you were without cash for the rest of the weekend. Sundays in my small town were served by one retailer, the gas station with a small shack called a grocery store attached, but they were open only for a couple of hours on Sunday, book ending the protestant church service hours, so folks could grab what they needed on the way to church, or on the way home.
One roared question from my father or the father of my best friend would send us scurrying -- "WHO DRANK ALL THE GODDAMN MIX?" Mix, of course, being the pop that one coloured one's glass of whiskey with. We were forbidden to take pop for ourselves from the fridge at that age, but of course we did, gulping it clandestinely, greedily from the big glass bottle (26oz the max at the time) so that the fizz and acid burn would make us gasp and our eyes water.
The danger in that roared question of course was that with no place open to buy more mix, once the mix was gone on a Sunday it was gone. [As the years went on it lost its urgency for a couple of reasons -- we got a Mac's Milk in town that opened late, seven days a week and my father swore off pop mix for water, although he used to hold the glass full of whiskey just to the side of the stream of water coming out of the tap, thinking he was fooling us into thinking he wasn't drinking his poison straight up).
As I entered my teen years jumbo bottles of pop arrived, now standard fare. Problem was those big bottles first arrived in glass bottles and they had a penchant for exploding on the shelf or certainly becoming grenades of glass shrapnel if dropped. There was one of several town drunks (Sorry Bert, if I remembered his name I'd repeat it) who used to always stagger into the grocery store I worked in and order one of us to get him his x number of large bottles of Pepsi. On occasion he'd wander down the aisle and get his own.
Exploding glass pop bottles of the super size became quite an issue for awhile until they were eventually banned, so as this guy would struggle to the front of the store haphazardly carrying four or five of them we always speculated what would happen if he dropped them. Once, shortly after he wandered out of sight down the pop aisle there was a tremendous sound of explosion -- our not so friendly drunk (he was a miserable bastard) had knocked four or five of the big bottles off the shelf and onto the floor. The aisle was awash in liquid sugar, glass everywhere, by the time we raced to see the carnage. Walking out of it, like some hero out of the mist, untouched, was the drunk carrying his several bottles of pop. We found large chunks of glass three or four aisles over as we cleaned up and for months afterward as we cleaned top shelves continued to find glass. I remember too that the new, heavy linoleum which covered the cement floor (the grocery store had once been the GM dealer and auto shop) was cut clean through in places from where the bottles had hit and exploded. The drunk didn't say a word, just payed and left.
The guy had a job, of course, as it was a small town and acute alcoholism was just another personality type. His father and him after his father had owned and operated a pop making and bottling plant in the town. Eventually it was bought out by a larger pop company and was reduced to bottling pop -- they'd receive the syrup, mix it with carbonated water and bottle and cap it. Finally the wee pop plant became simply a distribution centre. The important fact, however, is that it retained all the old equipment.
Our drunk in this story used to famously drink dark rum and Pepsi. He also famously used to use his pop bottling facilities in a way that allowed him to mix dark rum and Pepsi in large pop bottles and cap them, several cases at a time. The son portion of the father and son owners of the grocery store I worked in had, as a teen, worked driving pop truck for the drunk one summer, so the drunk would acknowledge and chat with him sometimes when on his Pepsi buying runs. Once the drunk came in a bit excited and had a pissed off sort of sounding conversation with the son of my boss. Turns out the three or four cases of dark rum and coke (and I can assure you it was almost certainly more rum than coke) had mistakenly been loaded onto one of the trucks and delivered as regular "Kist Cola" to one or more of the stores along the route in Mid Western Ontario. The drunk was angry of course not because some kid might spend his birthday party getting all his 7 year old pals pissed on cola and on their way to liver disease before the age of 10, but because the drunk'd lost all that nicely pre-mixed, finely disguised (although the Police Chief Teddy Zimmer -- ain't making that up -- never arrested nobody for nothing in all the time I ever lived there) booze.
Of course the story spread through the town. The final hilarity is, not a single complaint was ever reported back to the Kist Bottling plant according to anybody who worked there.
One roared question from my father or the father of my best friend would send us scurrying -- "WHO DRANK ALL THE GODDAMN MIX?" Mix, of course, being the pop that one coloured one's glass of whiskey with. We were forbidden to take pop for ourselves from the fridge at that age, but of course we did, gulping it clandestinely, greedily from the big glass bottle (26oz the max at the time) so that the fizz and acid burn would make us gasp and our eyes water.
The danger in that roared question of course was that with no place open to buy more mix, once the mix was gone on a Sunday it was gone. [As the years went on it lost its urgency for a couple of reasons -- we got a Mac's Milk in town that opened late, seven days a week and my father swore off pop mix for water, although he used to hold the glass full of whiskey just to the side of the stream of water coming out of the tap, thinking he was fooling us into thinking he wasn't drinking his poison straight up).
As I entered my teen years jumbo bottles of pop arrived, now standard fare. Problem was those big bottles first arrived in glass bottles and they had a penchant for exploding on the shelf or certainly becoming grenades of glass shrapnel if dropped. There was one of several town drunks (Sorry Bert, if I remembered his name I'd repeat it) who used to always stagger into the grocery store I worked in and order one of us to get him his x number of large bottles of Pepsi. On occasion he'd wander down the aisle and get his own.
Exploding glass pop bottles of the super size became quite an issue for awhile until they were eventually banned, so as this guy would struggle to the front of the store haphazardly carrying four or five of them we always speculated what would happen if he dropped them. Once, shortly after he wandered out of sight down the pop aisle there was a tremendous sound of explosion -- our not so friendly drunk (he was a miserable bastard) had knocked four or five of the big bottles off the shelf and onto the floor. The aisle was awash in liquid sugar, glass everywhere, by the time we raced to see the carnage. Walking out of it, like some hero out of the mist, untouched, was the drunk carrying his several bottles of pop. We found large chunks of glass three or four aisles over as we cleaned up and for months afterward as we cleaned top shelves continued to find glass. I remember too that the new, heavy linoleum which covered the cement floor (the grocery store had once been the GM dealer and auto shop) was cut clean through in places from where the bottles had hit and exploded. The drunk didn't say a word, just payed and left.
The guy had a job, of course, as it was a small town and acute alcoholism was just another personality type. His father and him after his father had owned and operated a pop making and bottling plant in the town. Eventually it was bought out by a larger pop company and was reduced to bottling pop -- they'd receive the syrup, mix it with carbonated water and bottle and cap it. Finally the wee pop plant became simply a distribution centre. The important fact, however, is that it retained all the old equipment.
Our drunk in this story used to famously drink dark rum and Pepsi. He also famously used to use his pop bottling facilities in a way that allowed him to mix dark rum and Pepsi in large pop bottles and cap them, several cases at a time. The son portion of the father and son owners of the grocery store I worked in had, as a teen, worked driving pop truck for the drunk one summer, so the drunk would acknowledge and chat with him sometimes when on his Pepsi buying runs. Once the drunk came in a bit excited and had a pissed off sort of sounding conversation with the son of my boss. Turns out the three or four cases of dark rum and coke (and I can assure you it was almost certainly more rum than coke) had mistakenly been loaded onto one of the trucks and delivered as regular "Kist Cola" to one or more of the stores along the route in Mid Western Ontario. The drunk was angry of course not because some kid might spend his birthday party getting all his 7 year old pals pissed on cola and on their way to liver disease before the age of 10, but because the drunk'd lost all that nicely pre-mixed, finely disguised (although the Police Chief Teddy Zimmer -- ain't making that up -- never arrested nobody for nothing in all the time I ever lived there) booze.
Of course the story spread through the town. The final hilarity is, not a single complaint was ever reported back to the Kist Bottling plant according to anybody who worked there.
posted by Heipel at
9:28 PM
2 Comments:
This old grocery store is turning out to have a lot of good material on its shelves.
Hi.
I know that you've been thinking (as time gets late - even more pressingly) about trying to write your mother's story. You even bought that gadget to record her so you could. But her nerves make her self conscious and it doesn't seem likely now.
So instead, and based on this recent spate of memoirs and the freedom of writing and quality of what you've written, write your own story.
You have so much raw material here to work with that I know it would be amazing. Just keep writing these things down and it'll show up anyway.
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