Club Soda

In third grade I often played after school with Paul Greenberg. Paul was a bright, advanced student with a gifted imagination so we invented interesting games and play scenarios. For instance, Paul had crafted a small effigy of Adolf Eichmann out of rubber or putty (at that time Eichmann was on trial in Israel for war crimes). We hung the effigy from a gallows that Paul had built from cheap wood and the hangman's noose was made of wire. We weren't waiting for judgment to be passed on that monster, we decided to take justice into our own hands, a kind of Wild West justice. Once in the noose, the larger weight of Eichmann's putty body slowly pulled away from his faceless head, stretching the neck to a fine thread until it ultimately slipped off with the rest of the body and just the head remained swinging in the noose -- a gray, gooey pellet.  We watched the hanging process with glee . . . Anyway, that just gives you some idea. Paul and I also acted out skits where we were being chased by other monsters, of the Universal Studios variety, or perhaps Russian spies (it was the Cold War era after all). We snapped make-believe pictures of passersby who may have been potential spies or enemies. We held small flat stones up to our faces and pretended they were cameras. "Click! Click!"

Paul's father owned a liquor store in town. His father was an older man, somewhere in his mid- to late 50s, which seemed old in the early 60s. Mr. Greenberg had been friends with my grandfather before my grandfather had passed.

There was a storage room behind the liquor store lined with cartons of bottles, mostly beer and wine, some hard liquor and a few boxes contained soda of the mixer kind like club or ginger ale. Paul liked to play in the storage room (we made robots out of the empty boxes) but his father didn't like the idea of us playing back there, and they would argue about it, but eventually his father would relent and leave us alone.

The liquor store adjoined a luncheonette and a door connected the two businesses as a convenience to patrons of both. One Saturday afternoon Paul and I ate burgers at the luncheonette and then bought some comic books that we carried with us to the back of the liquor store. Paul had wanted me to try club soda, which I'd never tasted before. He pulled two club sodas out of a carton and we then climbed up onto some boxes with our club sodas and comic books. This was real cool, something different. We were maybe 10 or 15 feet off the ground and it was like a fort among the boxes, an elevated redoubt. Paul raved about club soda, maybe because he felt the beverage was more "grown up." I don't know, but I tried the club soda and didn't much care for it -- it had no taste.


So, as we were reading our comic books and drinking our club sodas, Paul accidentally knocked his bottle over and it fell to the cement floor and shattered into many pieces . . .

"Damn!" Paul said. He knew that if his father had heard the noise and entered the storage room there would be hell to pay. Instead, he decided he would clean the mess up himself, so he climbed down from the boxes and began to search the storage area for a broom to sweep up the glass. There usually was a broom back here, but not today. Overcome with guilt, I was worried that I should get down, that we were doing something wrong, but Paul assured me and said to stay where I was, he would take care of things. He finally gave up locating a broom and realized he would have to face the music and get his father. Before I even saw his father, I heard yelling, and soon Paul's father was in the storage room having a fit about the broken glass, and reprimanding Paul, and pretty much bemoaning the whole ridiculous idea of allowing us to play back here to begin with. And then came the last straw: Paul's father looked up at me sitting on top of the stack of  boxes. "Get down from there!" he hollered.  "Get out of here! Go play somewhere else" he hollered at both of us.

From that day onward, Paul and I played at his house, or in the park, or sometimes we played up at the stores or even in alleyways behind the stores, but we never ventured into his father's liquor store again. And it would be years before I ever drank another club soda.