No, this is not any tall tale of Peruvian paranoia powder, but actually about my lifelong addiction to Coca-Cola. (I guess it’s one of those things that float through the mind in this weird lull between the Obama election and the End of Civilization As We Know it, and as LA is once again, almost tediously, on fire.) Some recent posters of comments on Doc40 seemed to find this either distasteful or wholly unbelievable, but it is the truth and I refuse to succumb to shame, especially as others seem to share and understand my supposedly imperialist weakness.
I met my first Coke in England when I was somewhere around the age of four. My mother and a friend had taken the tiny Michael to a somewhat smart restaurant, and, by a process that I don’t really recall, I found myself looking at a tall glass of brown sparkling liquid with ice and a slice of lemon. Much of this may be clouded by memory distortion My first though was “wow, I’m getting a cocktail of my very own”, and then I tasted the thing and that was it. That first Coke was infinitely superior to the weird domestic soda-pops like Tizer, Vimto, ginger beer, or dandelion & burdock. I became a lifelong slave to the Bottlers of Atlanta, and totally understood how precise the commercial was that made reference to “an ice cold coke on the back of my throat.”
Not that just any Coke would do. Forget your plastic two-liter bottles. Coca-Cola should come super-chilled in the traditional waisted bottle, with a tightly sealed crown cap. The only other acceptable Coke delivery system is from a commercial spigot machine with the refrigeration and CO2 turned way up, and the syrup tuned down. I discover this as a teenager when I worked at London Zoo as a fry cook and frequently stumbled into work flying sideways from the previous night’s dose of blue or yellow mod pills.
Thus, to make a long story bearable, the ideal hangover cure has always been a Coke with the taste dulled by extreme cold and the caffeine forced into my system by the maximum possible carbonation. Around the same time, I was clued into the joys of Coke and alcohol by Fidel Castro (the Cuba Libre) and The Beatles (scotch and coke), but that's a whole other story that concludes with why I like to drink Jack Daniels and Coke on airplanes.
And now for some trivia from Wikipedia…
"In the United States, Stepan Company is the only manufacturing plant authorized by the Federal Government to import and process the coca plant. Stepan laboratory in Maywood, New Jersey, is the nation's only legal commercial importer of coca leaves, which it obtains mainly from Peru and, to a lesser extent, Bolivia. Besides producing the coca flavoring agent for Coca Cola, Stepan Company extracts cocaine from the coca leaves, which it sells to Mallinckrodt, a St. Louis, Missouri pharmaceutical manufacturer that is the only company in the United States licensed to purify cocaine for medicinal use."
The secret word is Better
