ANYWAY STORIES #1: THE 7-UP AT THE END OF THE RAINBOW

by Greg Moody (Moodstar@comcast.net)

My brother Dave was a Boy Scout.

No. Scratch that. He was not a Boy Scout. He was THE Boy Scout.

They could have put him on recruiting posters.

He rose through the ranks, gathered innumerable Merit Badges, was a Boy Scout Camp Counselor, was inducted into The Order of the Arrow and got just about every Boy Scout Award there was, up to and including Eagle Scout. I don’t know if he ever got the Catholic Religious Badge, the Ad Altare Dei, but I don’t think so. You had to be an altar boy to get that and we didn’t go to Catholic School, so he was ineligible. For some reason, I remember the medal as being the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God), which I always pronounced Angus Dei (God’s Sirloin). But that may have been the Lutheran’s medal.

I was a scout in the same troop, but didn’t get any of this neat stuff aside from a couple of lousy merit badges. (One was for Morse Code. I was terrible at it. If I had been on the Titanic, the message would have read: “Ice. Drink. Feck. Girls. Shoelaces.”)

Anyway, Dave was a Scout and he was damned good at it. He could tie knots, he could walk across rope bridges without getting sewing machine knees, he could swim a mile without once getting bored enough to flip on his back and look for airplanes through algae encrusted myopic eyeballs while Bluegills nibbled on his swimming suit, he could make a fire with two sticks and a hunk of string and he could bake a rather delightful puff pastry over this selfsame fire, finishing off the day with campfire songs about peace, friendship, teamwork and Native American History I’ve since found to be hideously wrong.

My fondest personal memories of Boy Scout Camp are that I refused to go to the bathroom for a week because all the toilets were sitting out in the middle of nowhere with no privacy whatsoever (leading to a very strange walk home come Friday), and, that my tent mate one summer would later go on to walk next door in his apartment building and stab his neighbor something like 256 times.

(And you wonder why I spend most nights staring at the ceiling.)

Anyway, for years, at the beginning of each and every summer, Dad loaded us into the car and hauled Dave and all his gear up to one of the two Boy Scout camps in the District, Camp Ottawa near Newaygo or Camp Shawondossee on Duck Lake near Muskegon. (There was a great Italian restaurant on the drive up to Shawondossee. Why I remember that rather than any of my camping experiences is beyond me.)

One year, on the way to Camp Shawondossee, by far, the better of the two camps, Dad loaded the old 7-UP aluminum cooler in the back of The Lemon, his bright yellow Ford station wagon that was forever in the shop, and then proceeded to load me in beside it. He stuffed the cooler with seemingly hundreds of bottles of various soft drinks: Coke (the original stuff that would dissolve teeth), 7-Up,Tab, Fresca, Vernor’s, Dad’s Root Beer, and a variety of fruit flavors so highly carbonated that they should have come with a warning: “Caution: May Cause Abdominal Distension.”

There were also two bottles of Falstaff in there, as Dad was a big fan of Dizzy Dean and his weekly cry to Pee Wee Reese, “Come on, Pee Wee! Les’ have anudder Fawstaff!” Dad was a sucker for subtle, sophisticated advertising. He was Don Draper’s target audience.

A number of sandwiches were stuffed in there as well, between the bottles, as Dad was sick of spending money at any restaurant where some cook resembling Chef Boyardee would stomp out of the kitchen and ask in a bellow why he didn’t finish his Cacciatore. We were going to eat on the road.

And so we did. And it was a very pleasant drive up along the shoreline and through the forests on the western edge of the Michigan mitten.

When we got to camp, Dad and Mom unloaded Dave and his gear and carted him off to register for his time in camp. My older sister, JoAnn, wandered off to explore the camp with a bored late teenaged eye, while little Louie scampered close behind.

Me, I stayed at the car to protect the cooler.

I popped the top open and looked in, shocked by what I found: aside from the three that I had guzzled during lunch, no one else had touched anything in the cooler. It was a glittering forest of high sugar, carbon dioxide infused goodness staring back at me.

Luckily, the cooler had an opener mounted on the side, so I took a Grape Soda and popped the cap to an explosion of purple bubbles. It went down smooth, so smooth, the imitation grapes, conceived and constructed in the northwest corner of the soft drink factory laboratory fairly dripping with a rich and heavy flavor. I next tried an orange, which, if we’re being totally honest, was an arrogant little brew, unlike any flavor found in nature. Then, a Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer, followed by two Coca-Colas and a 7-Up. Things began to feel rather stuffy down below.

I belched a long and satisfying rattle that began at my toes and boomed out across the camp parking lot. In truth, I could belch, but only under the proper conditions. Dave, on the other hand, could belch on cue. It was a talent that I always envied and admired in him.

I felt better.

So, I continued on.

Tab tasted like a rather thin and chemically concocted version of Coca-Cola. Fresca was merely a rip off of Squirt, a citrus pop with a huge carbonation content. Vernor’s, well, Vernor’s was God’s gift to the Michigan soda aficionado: a highly carbonated Ginger Soda (we always called it Ginger Ale, screw you Canada Dry), that no matter how carefully you drank it, made you sneeze and belch, both magnificently.

I did both and immediately carried on.

Two bottles of an off brand, indistinctly flavored pop were followed by a bubble popping out of my right eye.

I was like a drunk at the peak of inebriation, sitting within that moment when everything is pleasantly fuzzy and you have the courage of an incredibly stupid, fantastically clumsy lion. I held fast at the crown of the alcoholic roller coaster. In mere moments, I would clear the top and hurtle down the rails toward my fate.

I dug around the dead soldiers in the cooler, looking for just one more to top me off.

There was nothing left except for two clear bottles of Falstaff, filled with a golden liquid that called, in the voice of Dizzy Dean, “Come with us, Greg! Pee Wee and me havin’ a great time! We gonna have some fun here, boy.”

This was bad.

I was just a kid.

I was not supposed to drink beer.

But, then again, I liked Ol’ Diz. He wouldn’t lie to me, even if his face was swimming in the middle of a bottle of cheap and often skunky suds.

Mom sat on one shoulder and said, no, Baby Jesus will be upset with you.

Diz sat on the other shoulder and told me to grow a pair (a pair of what, I didn’t know) and drink up.

As a freight train of sugar rumbled through my brain pan, I could only figure that Dizzy Dean made the most sense.

I opened the first Falstaff.

It was terrible. It tasted like old, wet hay, filtered through a raccoon. It took another sip. I shuddered. It was worse. Somehow, there was a vague sense of old socks, dead dog and my third grade teacher’s perfume about it.

Maybe … maybe … if you drank it fast.

And down it went.

A mighty belch later, and all was right with the world, except for the fact that one little devil remained, staring at me, calling my name, telling me that he was lonely and I was a handsome, strong and attractive hunk of suntanned bronzed and fearless youth, ready to take on the world with a sharp eye, a devilish grin and a swagger that would make John Wayne blush — after just one more.

And so it was: I finished the last Falstaff, slid out of the back of the car and wandered over to the Headquarters Hut of the Grand Valley Council of the Boy Scouts of America’s Camp Shawondossee, taking one of those circuitous routes only found on treasure maps and in Family Circus cartoons.

Eventually, I got to the building.

I propped myself up on the wooden railing and gazed off into the pristine, old growth forest of Western Michigan.

Dizzy Dean was in my head pitching a no hitter against the Chicago Cubs. “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” played through my head at the wrong speed on a cheap, Hopalong Cassidy record player.

A pretty girl, about my age, walked past me. She smiled. I smiled.

I opened my mouth to say hello.

And the Devil made his first appearance of the day.

First, it was the Falstaff, bright gold, arching over the railing and landing some five feet beyond where I stood. I had never achieved such distance, such accuracy, such volume.

Then, came the off brand sodas, purple and a vague pinkish brown.

Families screeched and ran for cover. Flies abandoned treasured piles of crap for the other side of the lake. Bambi and his mother raced straight into the forest where man waited patiently.

I couldn’t breathe. It was all happening too fast.

A man rushed up to help me.

“Son, son, are you okay? I’m the camp chaplain and … OH, JESUS CHRIST!”

It was the Fresca, a sort of pale green on tan, wing-tip Florsheims.

I thought, for some reason, that liquids were supposed to mix in your stomach and not stay in stratified layers of color, but not so, at least not this time and not my liquids.

The Vernor’s arced a full seven and a half feet, propelled, I’ve got to imagine, by its great carbonation. It was as good coming up as it was going down.

Tab. Oh, Tab. It burned. It burned so bad.

7-Up and Dad’s and Coke and Orange and Grape and the skeleton of a frog I had swallowed when I was six on a bet with one of Dave’s buddies quickly followed, all painting the floor of the forest a variety of colors while cutting down greatly on the season’s fire danger.

Oh, please, dear Lord, just let me breathe! One breath! That’s all I ask and I’ll be a good boy forever and ….uuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrkkkkkk.

Suddenly, it was more noise than content, more dioxide than Dad’s. Slowly, carefully, I took a breath.

It was over.

I gasped for air.

All out. All out.

It had to be all out.

I tried to swallow, but there was nothing left to swallow.

Just breathe. Just breathe.

Word had gotten around the camp. Some kid was blowing magnificent chunks at the Main Cabin. It would take the Scouts weeks to clean it all up.

A crowd gathered.

I leaned on the railing and wheezed, trying desperately to catch my breath.

Mom came rushing out of the office door, the wood frame screen slapping angrily closed behind her.

“Greg! Oh, my God! Greg! Are you okay?”

I looked at her. I couldn’t say anything. Beyond the fact that there was nothing to say, it was just physically impossible to talk.

I made sounds like an ancient Hoover that had just sucked up the cat.

She looked over the sea of beer and soda forming its own shimmering lake as it dribbled into the woods, the imitation colors and flavors glistening brightly in the early June sunshine.

“Good Lord … what did you do?”

She looked at me in amazement.

“What did you do?”

My lips trembled. My jaw worked up and down in a pale imitation of talking.

“Answer me.”

“Well …”

And then –

Without –

Warning –

The Devil –

Came Out –

To Play -

Just –

One –

More –

Time.

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