First Coca-Cola

By Rodney Jones

Maybe a sin, indecent for sure—dope,

The storekeeper called it. Everyone agreed

That Manuel Lawrence, who drank

Through the side of his mouth, squinting

And chortling with pleasure, was hooked;

Furthermore, Aunt Brenda,

Who was so religious that she made

Her daughters bathe with their panties on,

Had dubbed it “toy likker, fool thing,”

And so might I be, holding the bottle

Out to the light, watching it bristle.

Watching the slow spume of bubbles

Die, I asked myself, could it be alive?

When they electrocuted Edwin Dockery,

He sat there like a steaming, breathing

Bolt, the green muscles in his arms

Strained at the chair’s black straps,

The little finger of his right hand leapt up,

But the charge rose, the four minutes

And twenty-five hundred volts of his death,

Which in another month will be

Thirty-five years old. So the drink fizzed

With the promise of mixtures to come.

There it was. If the hard-shell

Baptists of Alabama are good and content

That the monster has died, so am I.

I swallowed. Sweet darkness, one thing

Led to another, the usual life, waking

Sometimes lost, dried blood in the ear,

Police gabbling in a strange language.

How else would I ever gauge

How pleasure might end, walking

Past midnight in the vague direction

Of music. I am never satisfied.

Copyright Credit: Rodney Jones, “First Coca-Cola” from Things That Happen Once. Copyright © 1997 by Rodney Jones. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Source: Things That Happen Once (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1996)