COME ON BABY, LIGHT MY FIRE

~ ~ 1959 ~ ~

 “Hey Beryl! Gimme a Pine Tree Float!” This demand causes my little cousin on the next stool to giggle-snort unsanitarily. Which feeds my ego. I’m on a roll. I mean, face it: that was funny.

But then Beryl, the establishment’s senior-most matron, always humble and sweet and nurturing, actually does fill a counter glass with ice-water, placing it before me on a napkin. I spy the floating toothpick spinning like a compass needle on the water’s surface . “Oh,” I say. “I guess you heard that one already.”

She’s smiling her Glinda the Good Witch smile. “Yes, Tommy,” she replies, “back in… oh… 1935…”

Lanpher’s Drug Store, the local ‘watering-hole for us after-school junior high and high school kids. Belly-up to the bar after the long day’s ride in the classroom saddle, and wile away the hour or so till supper time, nursing a cherry Coke or a root beer Fuzzy. And there’s the juke box, when somebody’s lucky enough to have the required quarter. The soda jerks are a bevy of part-time housewives and moms who seem to take a matronly interest in our tiny soap opera lives, and (the biggest reason we guys hang out here) the part-timers, the pair of hot ‘teen angels’ from the high school. And because we are God’s gift to the otherwise bored world of our elders, we preadolescent good ol’ boys ‘entertain’ them with the little witticisms we pick up from our older brothers.

“So …” she continues, “will you be wanting some dessert, after all that?”

I look to my left and right, surveying my potential audience. The high-schoolers have pretty much been here and gone. OK, so there are a couple of ‘dumb girls’ down at the far end who look like they could stand to be impressed, so I call, “Yeah. Make it a Zombie.” Which elicits a delightful “YUCK!” and a “Gross!” from my intended targets. “Make that two,” says my little shadow.

Actually, I can barely stomach Zombies, which are a phosphate conglomeration of malted milk and every flavored syrup known to man: orange, strawberry, lemon, lime, vanilla, Coke, root beer, cherry, ginger ale, and sarsaparilla. But it is secretly believed, in an underground urban legend kind of way, that a drink tasting this ugly almost definitely has to get you at least a little drunk. My real drink of choice is the ever-popular Root Beer Fuzzy. Girls invariably drink cherry-Cokes.

“Sorry,” Beryl apologizes, “but only the Pine Tree Floats are on the house.

“No problem!” From my pants pocket I ferret out a thin dime and slap it on the counter. “Plenty more where that came from,” I lie. Then I leer down the counter at the girls, hoist my glass, and cry, “Bottoms up!” I perform the ritual chugging demonstration, managing seven or eight controlled swallows before my autonomic nervous system drop-kicks me right into Regurgitation Mode. Slamming the glass down on the counter, I convulse with a couple of involuntary lurches and a shudder that nearly dislodges me from the stool…

 “Eeee-YEW!” and “Ohmygod… you are so… disgusting!”.

“Ya got post-nasal drip,” titters my cousin.

“Napkins are right here, Tommy,” Beryl says in her patient, motherly voice. “Would you like me to wipe your nose, or would you prefer to do that yourself?” I glower, and pluck out a hank of them. Then, to kill time, I start to spin on my rotatable counter stool…

Oops! My knees bump into some high school kid seated to my left. “Sorry,” I apologize quickly.

“Watch it, shrimp!” He snorts at my limp apology, and sneers down upon my half-full glass. “Whatsa matter? Lose your appetite?”

“No, I… Uhmmm… I’m…just waitin’ for my friend here to…”

“Sure you are, shrimp boy, sure you are.”

I resent the implication that I don’t have the ‘stuff’ to down this drink in a single gulp. So I bring the glass up to my mouth, press my lips onto the cold rim, tip back the glass, and take a good pretend swig. Sporting a fresh Zombie moustache, I drop the glass back onto the countertop and produce a satisfied Hollywood “Ahhhh!”

“You could really use some acting lessons, know why? Cause you stink at it.”

I glare down into my drink. Suddenly, though, I’m startled by a rock-hard click click click on the counter top. My new nemesis here is tapping a quarter on the Formica as if sending an urgent Morse code message. click click click! “Beryl!” he calls. “Whattaya say? Hit me with a Hot Shot!”

I’m thinking, wait a minute… ‘Hot Shot’…? What the heck’s a ‘Hot Shot?’

Appraising him with her saintly smile, she dries her hands. “Oh no,” she clucks, a mother hen who knows what best for her chick, “You do not want one of those.”

He holds the quarter up like a playing card. “But I do though.”

OK now, see, here’s the thing. I practically live at Lanpher’s. I know the menu backwards and forwards. So this conversation is making no sense at all because there is no ‘Hot Shot.’. So naturally, my ears have pricked right up. Not only has he asked for an unknown entity… but she seems to know what he is talking about. “No,” she says, shaking her head in a kindly, agreeable fashion. “You don’t.” What the…? What is going on here?

And here he does something really cool. He lays the quarter down on the counter and just stares at it for a moment. Then he places the tip of his index finger on it, dead center, and looks up at her. A dramatic silence hangs there between them for a count of about six, like he’s James Dean or something, before he inches it forward like a poker chip. “Like I said. One Hot Shot please.” Man, I‘m thinking, that’s how I should’ve paid for my Zombie. My index finger twitches as I imagine sliding that imaginary dime…

“Please don’t ask me to do that, Jimmy. I don’t think you …”

“C’mon, Beryl. I got things to do… places to go…”

“But after a Hot Shot, you might not be able to remember what those things are.” She smiles wisely with an uncomfortable worry. He looks at her. She looks back at him. It’s a standoff. Finally, though, she blinks. “I’m against this,” she says.

What the blue blazes is going on here…?

“Beryl, save it, OK?” He picks up his quarter and holds it out to her at arm’s length. “Customer wants to buy a drink.”

“Well… all right then. It’s your funeral.” Resigned, she takes his money and rings it up at the register. “I wish they’d never started this, though…”.

Guys like me are always on the lookout for tips on how to be cool. We model ourselves after the Cary Grants and Clark Gables on the silver screen. I’m an apprentice in training.  

She steps over to the high shelves, looks up, selects an object, returns, and places a little glass vial topped with an old-fashioned glass stopper down on the counter. With an inch of perfectly clear liquid at the bottom. Might be water. Could be white vinegar. The stopper clinks when she uncorks it.

“It’s not too late, you know,” she advises. He just shrugs that off. So with a sigh and a shake of her head, she produces a long-handled ice-cream-soda spoon from under the counter. Man, am I glad I’d decided to come in here THIS afternoon! He nods: proceed. Carefully then, lest she spill any, she drips out some drops into the spoon. When she puts the vial back down, I’m flummoxed. I mean, come on…THIS is the dreaded ‘Hot Shot’? What is it…? What’s it taste like…? Why, there’s much less than a teaspoonful there!  A half-empty teaspoonful? This guy’s not so tough.

“Last chance…” she offers.

He looks her right in the eye, draws in a long, deep breath and holds it for about ten seconds. “Down the hatch!” This guy’s really something. Then he says, “Now!”

I’ve never seen a kid his age get spoon-fed, like he was some bibbed-baby in a highchair. Hunched forward on his stool… eyes closed and mouth parted like some faithful penitent receiving the blessed communal wafer… (me, taking notes in my head and contemplating how long it’s gonna take me to dig upmy own quarter somewhere… and what the best day might be to do this, in terms of gathering up a suitable audience. I mean, boy will my twerpy little pals drop dead with envy, or what!)

The scoop of the spoon passes between his teeth. His lips close upon the handle. He swallows. The spoon withdraws, empty. I lean back away from him, the better to frame his reaction. Again, he and Beryl are locked in eye contact, when… Wham! A violent spasm snaps him like a wet towel. He goes rigid! Then his head starts cranking around, back and forth… left, right, left… slowly at first, then faster and faster, like geez, here comes Mr. Hyde!

A rising low-pitched-siren moans in his open-mouthed skull. It grows louder… approaches air-raid warning proportions, the perfect sound-effect for the movie scene where fighter pilots scramble to their jets out on the tarmac! Beryl shoves a clinking water-and-ice-cubes glass toward him. “Here,” she says. He rips it out of her mitt and cracks the rim of it off his front teeth, upending it, ice and all into his mouth. The siren halts as he gulps at it, but then he freezes! He seems to be staring off at some ‘vision’ over Beryl’s shoulder… “Gah!” Then he’s thrashing his head back and forth again, his jowls rattling with ice. And me with a ring-side seat! “More ice!” he commands, like an operating room surgeon demanding a scalpel. Beryl, the obedient nurse, wheels away at once to retrieve! This is incredible! But then his head jerks around and his wild eyes settle upon me. “The hell you lookin’ at!?”

“Errr…” I wasn’t exactly expecting to get involved.

“WHOA!” He spasmed, just about jumping me up off my stool.  Then exhales wide-eyed as if he’s just experienced some philosophy-shattering epiphany, and suddenly his desperate eyes are flitting up and down the counter as if he searching out a pen or pencil to jot it down, whatever it is. He’s blowing rhythmically now. Then his wild eyes lock onto my Zombie, right there on the counter in front of me. “WHOA!” he cries once again with another jolt, as if his previous unbelievable epiphany has just been replaced by an unbelievably even more incredible one!

Suddenly he just grabs my glass out from under my nose, tosses his head back, and chugs what’s left! Time to move down a few stools, I think to myself.

Nurse Beryl appears with a refill of ice and water. But with a vehement shake of his head, he declines it. He seems to be meditating on the last remaining intake of my Zombie, which he is now swishing like mouthwash around the inside of his mouth. “No. This… works… better,” he growls. He wildly scans the counter once again. Then suddenly, he’s digging down deep into his pants’ pockets. Out comes a comb, a book of matches, a small jackknife, and a handful of change.

He rifles the coins and plucks out two dimes, one of which he plants on the counter before me; the other he pushes over in front of my cousin. Then, with a big shudder, swallowing his current mouthful, cocks his head to the left in a four-second pose of introspection… sufficient time to clench some decision, apparently… and swipes my cousin’s glass off the countertop as well. And knocks it back.

“Jeez! These taste like… crap! But they work!” Looking down into my cousin’s sheepish eyes, he adds, “Doin’ you a favor, kid.”

 “I tried to tell you,” Beryl offers.

“I know, I know. But hey, listen, Beryl.” He yanks a pack of Kools out of his shirt pocket. “You are an official eye-witness on this. Right?” He’s kinda gasping between words. “You watched me do it. So you’ll hafta tell’em, OK?”

“Of course I will, Jimmy. You needn’t worry about that. I’m sure they’ll…”

“’Cause I got something riding on this, if you know what I mean.” He plugs a cigarette in between his lips. “But they’ll believe you, Beryl. You tell’em I did it…? Then OK… I did it.” He lights the Kool, takes a deep drag, and immediately forces down another gulp of Zombie.

“Oh, you did it all right.” Beryl pushes the nearest counter ashtray over in front of him. “Despite my misgivings.”

 “Yich!” he says, and takes another hit off the smoke. “Man! That ol’ Hot Shot! It just… it keeps on a-burning, don’t it! Thank God for menthols! I mean… by God! Whew! OK,” he concludes, tapping a fleck of ash from the tip of his cancer stick and then downing most of the rest of my cousin’s grog. And shivers hard. “Gotta get me some fresh air…” He shudders, rises from his stool, and is heading for the door, puffing up a storm…

Leaving me with much to think about…

OK, I already have ten cents in hand. Somehow I’ll hafta scrape up another fifteen… but, that’s what returnable bottles lying in ditches are for, ain’t it. But, need to get it by Thursday, because Thursday’s Boy Scout night over at The Hall, just across the street.

THURSDAY NIGHT…

Vanilla Cokes seem to be the going drink. And I like vanilla Cokes. They go down smooth, a lot like root beer fuzzies. But there is to be no vanilla Coke in my immediate future. Oh no. Tonight…? Water on the rocks!

And now that pretty much everybody but me’s been served their frosty little Coca-Cola glasses with straws, and the hub-bub has suitably died down, I slowly draw my right hand up out of my pants pocket with… The Quarter. And CLICK it, loud, just once, off the counter top, like Meeting will come to order! Then I let my lazy eye travel down the bar to gauge the powerful effect my dramatic move has just had on the denizens… OK… nobody’d noticed it.

CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, CLICK… CLICK!

There! That got their attention! Everybody’s pretty much all looking over at me now, quieting down noticeably and no doubt wondering, What the heck’s HE up to?

“Beryl?” I call down the aisle behind the counter. Beryl straightens up from jotting down some inventory in a little notebook.

“Hi, Tommy. Decided what you’d like?”    I set the quarter spinning like a little upright gyroscope. The two hours of rehearsals pay off; the coin spins on a single spot as if nailed there. And then… WHAM! My palm flattens it dead in its tracks! I place the tip of my index finger on it, dead center, look up at her, and let the dramatic silence hang there between us for a count of about six and then, James Dean-me, inch it forward like a poker chip. “One… Hot Shot, please.”

Everybody freezes! Beryl looks like somebody’s slapped her across the face. “Wha-at?”

“What’s a… a… a hotshot?” somebody a few stools down wants to know. But this isn’t about him, is it. No, it‘s all about me tonight. I don’t even vouchsafe a response.

“Whoa-ho-ho-ho-NO!” laughs Beryl, but it’s a laugh in name only, one with no merriment in it. “No way, Tommy, are you getting one of those!” I’ve anticipated this response, and am pleased to feel the tension growing among the boys lined up and leaning on their elbows at the bar. Me, the gunslinger who’s just brushed back his coat tail to reveal the big iron holstered on his hip. I deliver my line.

“Oh… but I am, Beryl. I am.” Cool. Confident. So…

“Tommy…” she begins, and then just decides to end it with a simple, flat, “NO!”

“Sorry, Beryl,” I say, patronizing her like, sure, I can understand your matronly instincts and so on, but they’re wasted on the hard likes of me. “I’ve got the money.” And with that I zip the quarter over the bar’s polished surface where it slows to a dead stop right in front of her. Heh heh… am I good, or what?

“That’s not going to happen,” she informs me.

“So… what’s a hotshot?” the voice still wants to know.

I go straight into ‘gunslinger mode.’ “I’ll tell you what a Hot Shot is, boys…” me, speaking to everyone in the joint with my eyes, unblinking, remaining locked on Beryl’s. “A Hot Shot is…” and here I allow the silence to tick some seconds off the clock, for suspense, “…twenty-five cents! For the guy that’s got it. Ain’t that right, Beryl.”

“Tommy, you don’t realize it, but a Hot Shot would just about kill you. You…”

“Isn’t that practically what you said to that other kid, Whatsizname? Jimmy? And didn’t I watch him walk out of here? Both alive and well?”

“He’s four years older than you! He’s in High school! And besides, he’s… OK, he doesn’t have a brain in his head!”

I twist my mouth into a wry grin, and point to the quarter lying there on the counter. “I’ve heard that the customer is always right…”

“Well, that may be true, normally, but you…”

“And this customer here is tired of slugging down the same ol’ Zombies alla time.” Heh heh.  Just imagine the whispers now: What? He matches drinks with some high school guy? He slugs down Zombies… practically like water? Wow! Man!

“Let me tell you something, Tommy. It’s true, I don’t want to serve you a Hot Shot. But more than that, you don’t want one. You just don’t know it yet. But if I give you one, oh boy will you ever know it then!”

Hmmm. She’s hanging tough. But she’s a woman, and I sense her weakening. “You ever try one, Beryl?”

“No, I haven’t,” she says simply. “Of course not. And I’m not about to!”

“So… how do you know if I want one? Maybe if you had one, you’d like it.”

“Oh you’d just better believe I’m not having one! I know better.”

“There’s my quarter. Bring it on.” She looks at me with a quiet exasperation. But then her eyes soften. She tiredly shakes her head in resignation. “OK, Tommy… you know what? You’re about to learn a valuable little lesson this evening. A lesson I don’t want you to have to learn, but…” She turns and heads back down toward the end of the counter.

“Thank you, Beryl.” I toss a wink, like a bone, to the boys. She returns with the magic bullet: the vial. With a nod, I point once again to my quarter on the counter. Surprisingly, she pushes it back in front of me.

“Paying for this lesson would be adding insult to injury. This one’s on the house.”

“Really? Hey, thanks, Beryl! This way, I get to save my money for the second one.”

She actually glares at me. Finally, “Do you think you’re ready, Tommy?” Her kind, empathetic voice is gone. She’s gotten the ice-cream-soda spoon out.

Well thanks to me, my audience is going to be treated to something special this evening. None of them’s even heard of a Hot Shot before. They’ll be talking about me at school for weeks.

 “Any time you say, Beryl.” I answer, all cucumber-cool sittin’ on that stool.

Again the stopper makes the crystal clink as she removes it. Positioning the spoon horizontally, she drips in a few drops. Hah! Look at how tiny that is! So. “Down the hatch!” I cry, eyeing my envious fans doing the only thing they can do… sitting there gawking on me in awe and wishing they had a quarter this evening. I vouchsafe them a wink as I close my eyes and open wide as the cold spoon grazes my lower lip going in.

And as it withdraws, my upper lip squeegees every last molecule from the spoon. The payload delivered…. I swallow. And pop my eyes open.

“What… that’s IT?” I say. “I can’t believe it!” The Big Dreaded Hot Shot, one big… nothing?

I start to glance over toward my Scout buddies, formulating a calculated smirk when…WHOA!

My face does a freeze-frame! And then, with a sudden will and mind of its own, my mouth just opens itself right up without any prodding from me, becoming a growing, gaping hole in the middle of my head! Like home movies when the film gets jammed up inside the projector, halting the reels dead in their tracks… the white-hot bulb melting a growing, black, bubbling, burn-hole in the celluloid which gets projected upon the movie screen like an unexpected, mushrooming wildfire…

…and suddenly, the burn-hole that has spread open across my face, is emitting a long, drawn-out, teakettle siren—  WwwaaaaahhWAAAAAHHWAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!!

And like the delayed shock-wave racing ahead after an atomic detonation? FLASH! The IMPACT bodyslams me! My brain goes up in flames like a gasoline-soaked rag! My tongue blackens, curls, and shrivels like newsprint in a woodstove…my throat is EEEing like a blistered steam whistle! A tsunami of hellfire flames comes rolling over and through me, instantaneously smashing down any and all neural breakwaters and dikes and dams and levees designed to fence in my other senses, leaving me hearing the flavor, smelling it, seeing it, shouting it! My entire soul, reduced in a flash to a single four-letter word (HELP!) that my lips and my tongue and my larynx cannot, for the life of me, articulate! And even though my eyes must be running down over my cheeks like molten egg-whites, I am somehow oddly aware now (in a blurred, tunnel-vision sort-of-way) of shelved shaving cream cans, tissue boxes, band-aids, shampoos, crutches and canes inexplicably flying past me, left and right, like I’m a runaway fire engine barreling down narrow streets… hell, I am a runaway fire engine… on fire! My siren caterwauling…! Me running amok up and down aisles past the paperback and magazine section, past the cold and flu supplies, past the vitamins… WAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!! …and back past the soda fountain again!

“Tommy!” calls Beryl from some place embedded deep behind the steaming membranes of my personal nightmare. “Back here! Ice water!”

Legally blinded by excruciation, I falter, veer left, then right, and finally lean into a hairpin U-turn to barrel-roll back toward the voice! I stumble up against the counter. A frosty glass is pushed into my smoking hands. Throwing back my head, and positioning my bansheeing wide-open mouth like some starving hatchling in a burning nest, I jerk the glass to my face and douse, more than drink. Cold water up my nose, down my gullet, down the front of my shirt, and… Hallelujah, Jesus! Don’t I feel salvation! I am redeemed, Brother! Blessed be she, the Angel Beryl, among women! I had thirsted in the desert, and I was slaked! I…

Gah! The reprieve! It’s only momentary! With all of the water gulped down, the lining of my mouth re-ignites like crackling tinder, despite the two ice cubes still pouched like acorns in my chipmunk cheeks. I try to cry out, More! but only sputter out a guttural, “MO!” My body and my brain have already done the math and figured out that… there is no way between heaven and hell that I can ever get MO! soon enough, so my legs are already doing what they know they need to… run! WAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!! Because they ‘believe’ (the fools!) if they can only run fast enough, just maybe they can outrun the flame thrower! But.. heat runs at the speed of light, and…

WAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!! Rat on fire in the maze! Look at him go! Past the prescription counter! Past the curling irons and Vicks vaporizers! (They’d warned me in Sunday school I’d end up burning in hell for all eternity! Oh, why hadn’t I listened?) Past the cigars and cigarettes! I’m afire in limbo here! Down past the front door, where…

Something snags my shirt collar and holds on firm, sending my feet flying right out from under me, jerking me around like a roped rodeo calf! I struggle like a drowning man to get free and flee, WAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!! but am yanked back again by the front of my shirt. I know only one thing at this moment: broiling at a standstill is far worse than barbequing on the run! So I thrash! I lash out! And as much as a soul can realize anything when it’s a fireball, my brain suddenly acknowledges that I am inexplicably blinking (What the…?) straight into Mom’s face! WAAHHWAAAAHH!!! Where’d she…?  WAAAAWAAAAAH!!! Oh… yeah… pickin’ me up after Scouts…

“Just what, Thomas, do you think you’re DOING…?” She is horrified.

I sum it all up for her: WAAAHHWAAAAAAAAHH!!! No man stands still while going up in flames! I wrench myself free and go pinballing brainlessly down the aisles again like a ricocheting stray bullet. WAAAWWAAAHWAH!!!

Good Lord, I sound like Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy!

But… whatever goes up, must come down, and she recaptures me as I come careening back down the next aisle, this time in an iron grip. “Tommy!” she says, with a face that’s drained of color, a horrified face. “You stop this nonsense!  Right now! You’re…” she’s beside herself, “embarrassing yourself! You’re… HEY! I said, STOP it! You’re behaving foolish! You’re behaving… idiotic! Stop this right NOW! Right… this… instant!! You’re embarrassing me! Us! Right NOW, Thomas!”

The poor woman… but poorer me! OK. I gotta try to explain it to her again! So…………. WAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!!

This time her face snaps into Serious Emergency Mode. Suddenly she’s steeled, determined, ready to do… whatever she must! Like the fireman pulling a victim from a burning building, she is dragging me (me, her dark, flailing, smoking, family embarrassment and the imaginary engulfed building he’s trapped in!) right out the front door!

Outside, she hauls open the heavy passenger door of our big black ’48 Plymouth waiting at the curb, more like a paddy wagon than ambulance tonight, and I am installed on the front seat. WAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!!

The door slams hard after me!

WAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!!

“Didn’t I just tell you to stop that?”

I’m practically breaking off the side-door window crank (Must… get… cool… air… into skull!) muscling down the pane. Mom hustles around to the driver’s side.

WAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!!

And as she peels rubber out of that parking space like some hot-rodding badass High School Confidential teenager… WAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!… me, I’ve got my gaping face hanging out the window like some tongue-lolling Irish Setter…

WAAAAAHHWAAAAAHHWAAAAAHHWAAAAAHH!!!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Turns out, I was one hundred percent correct.

Everybody’s been talking about me here at school for days…

NOTE: IF YOU LIKED THIS AND WOULD LIKE TO FIND OUT WHAT EXACTLY “‘THE HOT SHOT” WAS, LOOK FOR “COME ON BABY, LIGHT MY FIRE II” TO BE PUBLISHED SOON…