Script
In 1998 something wonderful happened. I found a two liter of OK Soda in the back of a refrigerator at a church.
I’d been pining for my long lost favorite beverage ever since it’s discontinuation three long years prior, so the occasion was momentous.
The church was Hope Lutheran North, the church of my youth, and I was in the kitchen doing something with the youth group, of which I was an active and enthusiastic member. I believe we were washing dishes for some reason.
No doubt bored and off task I perused the fridge, moved aside some ancient industrial grade Ranch Dressing and . . . there it was, shining like a fructose diamond.
I exclaimed, blasphemously, “Oh my god! It’s a two liter of OK Soda, the preferred drink of my slightly youthier youth! Dave! It’s OK Soda!”
Dave Newman was there. You know Dave, right? He was also excited.
We were about to drink it, when cooler heads prevailed. We didn’t know the shelf life of this stuff and posterity was to be considered. We would hide the two liter bottle of OK Soda for future generations, a kind of obscure time capsule.
We hid it.
But I do not recall where.
I want that two liter of OK Soda, future generations be damned.
And so I intend to find it. This is the story of my quest.
I woke up in a comfortable queen bed, top floor of the two-story stack of wood and love I call home, next to a mysterious woman I’d married five years earlier, feeling like a twice baked potato on its third time around.
I’m not getting any younger – none of us are, of course – and I’d slept more fitfully than a speed-freak in a bed bug motel.
I’d been dreaming. Nightmares, if you must know, of a bittersweet nature, like a snickerdoodle cookie dipped in chew spit.
My nightmares were of that twistedly wistful nature, the kind that make a fella pine for the past and dread the future and maybe feel a bit squeamish about the present to boot…hopeless and dark. They were dreams of cola – OK Soda, to be precise – and I’d been having them a lot lately. It seems I was being stalked by some kind of ironic, sticky liquid ghost, and he had a chip on his shoulder the size of Duane “The Rock” Johnson after he’s been shot with the laser that made the baby so big in Honey, I Blew Up the Kids, the sequel to the hit film, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids starring Rick Moranis.
“I can’t go on like this,” I whispered to myself, staring at the darkly handsome reflection in my bathroom mirror. “These minor disturbances are getting me down a little.”
The dreams, I knew, were the result of some unfinished business, an end from the past hanging looser than re-wrapped roll of cheap gas station bathroom toilet paper, and just as dirty. Slightly less dirty, maybe, if I’m being honest.
Some 20 odd years ago I’d hidden a treasure, and ever since that treasure had been calling out to me from whichever nook of Hope Lutheran Church I’d stashed it in. I’d forgotten the exact location due to the slow creep of father time, a couple dozen pounds of Pan’s Spinach, and a whole ocean of old Uncle Sloppy’s Fun Fun Milk.
Also, you know, it was a fairly minor issue in the grand scope of things. Like, when you really think about it.
But it was time. Time to revisit the old haunts and track down that liquid sugar nugget like a mad hunter on the trail of the ever elusive chupacabra, consequences be damned. Time to creep back inside of the sand brown brick walls and bland early 90s Protestant décor of the church I’d frequented in my youth, a church that held countless other secrets, undoubtedly, like, well, none come to mind. Lutherans, you know? But I was sure they were there, and wrapped in those other unspecified secrets would be my treasure – an aged 2 liter bottle of OK Soda.
Why did I need this particular 2 liter bottle of soda?
Why indeed.
I’m a wistful man, always have been. Don’t like it, you can beat feet, that’s what I say. And when a wistful man latches on to a thing it becomes more than a thing, more than a billion billion atoms smashed together in the shape of a soda bottle or a McDonald’s toy or a worn old t-shirt. It becomes a part of him, a reference point, a seed from which various, unanticipated tendrils can grow, tendrils that claw their way into his psyche and sprout unimagined flowers, flowers that disseminate pollen and a stink, but the good kind of stink, and cause more seeds and more tendrils and more good stink and occasionally a bee will come by and . . . I’m getting carried away. What I mean to say, if you’ll humor me just a bit longer, is that the wistful man is always seeking to explain himself to himself and to do that the wistful man must go back to the seed and trace the tendrils.
Why does the wistful man seek to explain himself? Ego and all the rest of that nonsense, I suppose, but also a sense of something greater in the world, something magical, transcendent, and if the seeds can be explained – catalogued and repossessed, understood – if that can happen then, well, maybe they’ll be some explanation of all of the rest of this rotten, good for nothing, scabies addled street bum we call life.
Anyway. I kissed the wife and kid goodbye, threw on my coat, and hit the pavement to hunt down a ghost or chupacabra or seed or whatever I was calling it a moment ago. It ain’t easy juggling all of these metaphors and similes.
I rolled my beat up old silver Ford Taurus – the one that looks like a million other silver Ford Taurus’s in this ranky dank town, dents and all – northward, like an obese, forlorn goose trailing the vee by a stretch on its way to Canada for the sunny season, over rivers of blacktop, past split level ramblers and old elm trees, towards my youth, like a time traveler, except it was only like 10 minutes away.
I began to see the sights burned into my subconscious – Fargo North High School, Hornbacher’s Foods, my Mom’s house, some gas stations I remember, a baseball field or some such thing.
And then I was pulling into the parking lot of Hope Lutheran Church, the haystack from which I hoped to withdraw my needle. I parked, full of trepidations. What mysteries awaited me? What truths would I be confronted with? Would I have to engage in small talk with someone I barely remember?
“Fuck it,” I snarled, exited the car and strode up to the door.
I took a deep breath, centered myself, grabbed the door handle and pulled.
It was locked.
Oh, well, just a bottle of soda. No big deal.
I went home and took a nap.
The end.