beverage

I once knew a man named Beverage who drank a two-liter bottle of Coke-A-Cola every single day. He drank it warm from a travel mug, keeping the bottle within easy reach on his desk. He was the first person I ever saw consume a Spicy Chicken Sandwich from Wendy’s, and his was the first review of that sandwich I ever heard.

Although he was tall, he was not exactly a cool drink of water; his figure was hulking. His long hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and invariably some heavy-metal band album art or concert tour information was visible through his dress shirt. He had an apparent fondness for The X-files, and a confirmed lust for Gillian Anderson. He listened to music which was noise; not the banging fuzz of the acid metal which old folks dismissively call noise, but real noise, like static mixed with the tearing of metal from metal against a rhythmless backbeat of randomly imploding paint cans. I told him about the time my friend and I had tweaked a synthesizer so that it created cacophonous and often surprising sounds, chaotically morphing over five minutes from the slobbery flatulence of the earth heaving up goey slabs of magma, to the stuttering groaning of an airplane wing as it is slowly ripped apart by unimaginable forces, and culminating in a rising screech which died in a tiny, almost ultrasonic piercing whine, like gnats dive-bombing your eardrum itself. Beverage listened to all this with unbroken interest, and encouraged me, with no trace of irony, to bring a sample to work so he could add it to his personal queue.

He was my elder technologist back in those days when I was first starting to become knowledgeable about computers. I’d pitch him the particularly perplexing questions on the back stoop of the office, next to the loading docks, where the smokers always smoked. He always delivered his answers concisely; yet he was thorough, never leaving out important details. He always ended his knowledge transference with the expression, “Thank-you, drive through!” Many of my questions came with funny anecdotes about the techno-illiterate souls we were charged to serve, and on relating any of these to Mr. Beverage, he’d simply take a drag on his cigarrette, look out across the parking lot and say, “People are such idiots.”