Pop
Linden Thomas drank Coca-cola every day for as long as I’d known him. When he was seven, he was the kid in the Coke ad. I didn’t know him then, but I’d seen the commercial. That’s sort of how we became friends. I saw him drinking a Coke and said that he looked familiar.
When he was six, his mother heard that the Coca-Cola Company was holding open auditions for their new commercial, so she made Linden drink Coke with every meal so that it would look like he really liked it. Linden hated the taste of Coke, but his mother said that it was important that he get this role, so he tried to stop grinding his teeth after drinking it. He got the commercial. I guessed that he must have been a pretty good actor after all.
After the commercial, he drank it every day. Some people said it was because he wanted people to recognize him. They said that he used to stand in the hallway and ask people if it looked familiar when he took a sip. He didn’t ask me, but I had moved there after everyone got annoyed with him. By that time I guess he was just addicted and had to drink it all the time.
Every day at lunch he’d lay out his feast: a salami or peanut butter or bologna sandwich, carrot sticks or a pudding snack, and a can, or, sometimes, an 8% recycled plastic bottle, of Coke. He always took a sip first, and smacked his lips, as though he was still on camera. They probably wouldn’t put him back on camera now, because his teeth were rotten.
Well, maybe they’d put him on, just not his face, or not his mouth, or maybe his mouth but not his teeth. If they were smart, they’d take the x-ray of his insides and put it on a billboard because his insides glowed. He had an x-ray taken and brought it in to show us, and by us, I mean me. Susan McBrian brought in an x-ray two weeks before that, and, for most of us, it was the first x-ray we’d ever seen. It was of her arm, and there were funny spots in the picture, and none of us talked to her again after that.
But no-one bothered to ask why Linden had an x-ray done. When you looked at that thing, it didn’t matter, because his large and small intestines lit up like twisted Christmas lights and spelled out “Always Coca-Cola.” All anyone could talk about for days was how he still digested with all those loose turns up in there. We wondered if it hurt to go to the bathroom when your insides were busy advertising.
Linden was positively glib, and talked for hours, trying to explain to us what it felt like, emphasizing that we couldn’t ever really know.
Twelve years later, when Linden Thomas moved out of Clearwater, New Jersey, to become a film-editor, a few people wondered if his large intestine ever really did spell Coca-cola.
I went out there to visit him a few times. He lived in a nice stucco house outside of Los Angeles and had a wife named Rhonda and two kids, Morris and Jayme. He seemed happy; he smiled a lot without opening his mouth.
Linden’s teeth were almost gone. They had shrunk back into his gums like spitballs, but he still chugged away at his Coke, saying it was the only thing that helped with the pain of living. He said that it had fantastic curative properties.
Before I moved to Clearwater, I had a friend named Mark. I always used to imagine what it’d be like if Mark wound up with me.
He was six when I was five, and he was blonde and blue-eyed and everything a blonde, blue-eyed boy should be.
While Linden was taping his Coke ad, I was trying to get him to notice me.
I think he was my first love.
Every boy that was even remotely considered post-Mark went up against the Mark test.
Mark and I never exchanged more than a few words, and the words were:
Mark: I like your shirt.
Me: …this shirt?
I wore it every day after that, until it got so ratty and the neck was so stretched out that it wouldn’t stay on right.
Before I moved away he gave me a picture that he’d drawn in crayon of the sky, except it was red. When I told him so, he scrunched up his face like he was about to cry. He told me he couldn’t see colors. I lied and said that that was how I saw the sky, too.
That night, driving up the highway to Clearwater, it was really windy and when the sun set the sky really did turn red.
