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Throat Punch Essays

Pepsi Breath

Serge Bielanko

Apr 15, 2022

“Alright, man,” my Pop-Pop sighs. “You good?”

In the brown Matador, the constant can of beer between his legs, me squinting from the curb and feeling weird, like this was it, like here we go and I am about to become the sole witness to some kind of creepy American history: this last bizarrely fat hard-on of the old battleship radarman, popping up out of his crotch like a a mushroom cloud appearing on the distant horizon: wiping out an entire city: wiping out everyone in its horrible path: my grandfather, a World War II Navy veteran who has never really found his way in the world after the big dance, smiles at me warmly with all the rising love that two semi-warm cans on the drive over here could possibly muster.

I stare at him, picturing his beer can cock and it makes me laugh a little. But I don’t think he ever notices that kind of stuff; I don’t believe the man ever knows- or even wants to know- the level of strange his grandson’s imagination is capable of hitting, even in what would seem to him the most mundane moments of a life that had gotten away from him long before I ever showed up.

It is late spring, 1985, and there I am, 13-and-a-half-years-old, the soul of American teenage averageness. Invisible somehow to the girls. Unthreatening to the boys. Part buckteeth and braces/ part emerging man-boobs/ and part undiagnosed anxiety-riddled .250 hitter in my best year. I am not cute or stylish or talented or wanted or even noticed as I walk this 7th grade Earth that often, unfairly, makes or breaks a kid for a long time to come. Hell no. Instead, decked out in my new maroon K-Mart parachute pants and matching jacket, I am something more bizarre and beautiful than anyone could have ever imagined, especially me (all these years later).

All these years later, and I’m just finally starting to see it all now.

Goddamn it.

___

Oh sweet Jesus on the crusty cross, look at me.

I weep at the sight/ at the wonder of it all. Like some grease-stained Virgin Mary, I guess. Watch her appearing on the wall behind the stove. Ha. Dear God, look at me.

Can you see me, man??

Look at that beet-colored mutt dropped out in front of the kill house by the town dogcatcher. At 13, in my matching parachute pants and jacket suit, stood out there in that deep retro sunshine, those Saturday morning rays/ showing up for a classmate’s birthday party. I’m invited, but you know/ not because I am cool or desired or someone might possibly to kiss me or even fight me or anything like that.

The truth is, and I know it even then, that I am more or less a number. I’m a birthday present/ a gift. At this pint, after years of other kids’ birthdays, I mean, I’m probably a pretty well-known commodity in the local party circles back then. Back in the back of McDonald’s on rainy Sunday afternoons or at roller rinks on sunny Saturdays: kids, they know. They understood my worth. I am no trouble maker. I won’t steal your girlfriend. Plus, you can bet all your Mike Schmidt baseball cards that I am good for something decent in the $5-8 range from Woolworths. Or maybe Sam Goody.

I have hit a lot of parties.

But soon, I suppose, that will all end as abruptly as it started..

Just like everything else.

____

“I’m okay, Pop-Pop,” I respond, confidently/ lying. “Thanks for the ride. I’ll see you at 3:30?”

I shift nervously, the wrapped present in my hand dragging me down but also getting me in.

I have so many butterflies. The sunshine feels warm but the waiting darkness makes my blood run cold. I want to get back in his car. Last chance. Just go. Just drive, man. Drive! But I don’t; I stay. I stand there, my question in the air between us, when finally he nods and flashes his false teeth at me like a switchblade knife. He nods and sips from his can, his third of the day already.

“Yeah, man,” he assure me. “I’ll be here.”

Then he is gone, slow rolling away from the curb outside the rink, outside the arena where I am expected. I sigh, head into the rink, into this hall of possibilities. I’ve got my hopes up and all, but I’m not dumb. I’m 13-years-old, nervous, void of confidence, ice cream chunky. Plus I have two zits on my face that look like Victorian cold sores. And I am wearing a fuck ton of parachute.

I am well aware that I am not invisible.

And yet I most certainly am.

Whatever.

_____

At the wall that separates the skaters from the shy kids and the pizza parties and the video games and the rest of the world that isn’t the rink: the colored disco lights would float across me leaning there, sometimes fast like wild bird shadows, and sometimes slow like sad goldfish. My legs are unsteady beneath me in my big heavy skates as I watch the play unfold. One kid after another, some skating as if they had been born knowing how, a few less confident, but smiling at their clumsiness/ at their needing this wall to survive.

Cold Pepsi. Paper cup. Ice cubes from a machine. All of it melting together in the darkness to allow me to taste that taste I can still taste now. The straw at my lips and the fire in my loins. Zeroing in on pretty girls from other schools, how they moved their arms to the sound of the music, how they took the turns with easy grace. Then a girl from my school, from my class, just inches away. I longed for it all, I guess, but what the hell does that even mean?

Cold Pepsi rattling cubes, I can barely hear you now beneath the roar of the Sister Christian. The hairs standing up on the back of my young sweaty neck. My un-kissed neck. My virgin boy neck. My husky turkey neck so far from the action, so far from the lips of the girls rolling by. But someday, I thought to myself.

Someday.

Sip of Pepsi.

Someday.

You're motoring
What's your price for flight
In finding mister right
You'll be alright tonight

Sip of Pepsi.

Girl with big boobs passing me by/ oh, girl with an angel face/ girl with Main Line freckle face/ god, what you do to me/ the way you flick your hair.

Sip of Pepsi.

I want to know you so bad.

I want to hurt myself for you.

I’d stab myself with a Phillie Phanatic pen for your attention.

Why am I not good enough?

Sip of Pepsi, have to pee.

Because I’m a bologna wrapped in parachute plastic.

Sip of Pepsi, slurping sound. Cold ice crashing. Here she comes.

Sister Christian
There's so much in life
Don't you give it up
Before your time is due
It's true
It's true yeah

Then it’s some kid from Gladwyne or Villanova or Bryn Mawr, some kid my age but with a house at the shore, pink OP shirt and, like, this real deal boardwalk coral necklace and this long blonde rat tail (so cool) like he just stepped off a surfboard and into that pair of roller skates. Skating so fine. Coming up behind her, all skinny and cute.

I watch it happen.

Me at the wall in my tight maroon, leaning on the steady wall, the painted lights floating, never staying, the blues and the reds and the yellows all passing over my skin and changing me momentarily, making me pretty, making me cool in some roundabout way, I hope.

Visible, maybe. Illuminated? Noticed? Discovered?

Eh.

I would settle for some kind of cheap singular visibility in what now feels like something shitty and familiar: these final fleeting moments of another roller rink wall lean.

He catches up to her just beyond the turn where I’m watching.

His arm goes to her hips and she smiles and she’s okay with it because they are together, I guess. I watch her legs moving in the same motion with his, each of them pushing at the world beneath them. Each of them running on water, side by side, together at last.

Motherfuckers.

Sister Christian
Oh the time has come
And you know that you're the only one
To say okay
But you're motoring!
Yeah motoring!

I use the wall to guide me back over to the tables that the party for the kid I know has over in the back.

I sit down and take a slice of pizza that the birthday boy’s Mom gives me.

China Girl comes on.

It’s so loud.

It’s so wonderful.

I’m so sad inside.

I’m so goddamn gross.

I wanna cry.

I wish I was in my Pop-Pop’s yard tossing baseballs in the air and hitting them up towards the house.

I'm feeling tragic like I'm Marlon Brando/
When I look at my China girl

I pour more Pepsi from the bottle, drown my sorrows with the sugar booze.

_____

Later, at the wall again, I stand in the lights, pizza in my guts, and I watch in wonder as a kid from my class skates by me again. He is this kid who is kind of like me, not really popular but no one hates him or anything. He likes cars, I think. And AC/DC. He has a perpetual smile. It doesn’t mean he’s happy, I don’t think. It’s something else, maybe. A mask, perhaps. I’ll never know.

I have a new cup of Pepsi; maybe my fourth, I don’t know. Who cares? Who gives a shit? I don’t even like Pepsi that much but it’s what the kid’s mom bought. I drink it out of spite. I’ll drink it all. I ought to puke all over this goddamn roller rink.

The caffeine runs my blood as things occur to me. Like I ought to slit my own throat with the Phillie Phanatic pen they have over at the skate rental/ then let my Pepsi blood squirt out all over the place. Fatso pinpricked water balloon: hard fast threads of my blood shooting into the eyes of Coral Necklace as he comes coasting by and boom: he is blinded by the crazy cold vampire soda blood and he slams into the wall and is paralyzed with the neck snap crack that everybody hears even above the blasting music.

That’s when I come out to calm Main Line Big Boobs down, wipe her crying eyes with a napkin I had wrapped around a hot dog only like a minute ago, whispering in her ear. Hey. I’ve got you. It’s alright, it’s alright, it’s okay, he’s gonna be okay, sweetheart.

But at the same time I’m hoping he is dead.

At the same time, I am using another roller rink napkin to try to stop the blood squirting out of the Phillie Phanatic pen hole I have in the side of my neck. Remember?

So, I would have my hands full with all that, yeah, but still. I’d have my arm around Main Line Big Boobs and she is calming down now as they take Coral Necklace out on one of those stretchers with the neck brace and all. It’s intense. I mean, neck stabilizing shit, that’s never a good sign. He’s better off just letting go, I’d say. Die with dignity.

Goodbye, Chief.

I will take care of Main Line Big Boobs for you. I see the way her mouth curls up on just one side when she smiles. You never noticed that kind of stuff about her! You never saw how lovely and wonderful and kind and caring she really is!

I SEE IT!

I SEE HER!

I stop the paramedics as they carry him towards the blaring sunshine at the open doors to the parking lot and the ambulance.

They pause, surprised.

I lift him a bit, undo the coral necklace, let him flop back down. Then I signal the medics to go as I put it on my neck, triumphantly. As he rolls away, his eyes: they flicker one last time.

Then they roll back up into his pretty little face.

I feel so alive.

_____

Head Over Heels is playing now and I want to skate finally because my heart is so many things this afternoon and this song, this melody, it is somehow inside of me and I cannot take it anymore.

I chug the last of that cup of Pepsi and it’s half melted ice and the whole caffeine thing is making me nervous and artificially alive now as I ease myself off the wall, through the changing orbs of light, and out onto the rink like some sad-ass Florida swamp deer running out into the Daytona 500. Just as I appear in that world, my right hand on this side of the wall for balance, Perpetual Smile comes racing around the rink with dazzling speed and moves/ zipping in and out of everyone. His wake, I feel it, and I am suddenly in awe or shock. Or I don’t even know what.

I am amazed.

It is amazing.

You keep your distance via the system of touch
And gentle persuasion
I'm lost in admiration, could I need you this much?
Oh, you're wasting my time
You're just, just, just wasting time

I squint at his bony ass disappearing into the crowd of Saturday skaters. He is better than all of them. And no one ever knew. No one ever had any idea. His presence in school is nothingness. He is there, just like me, and thats it. Nothing profound to ever report. No special skills anyone knew about. He isn’t shit on a field or a court, so easy to miss altogether, really. But now this.

He comes around again and his smile is massive and I think it must be real at this point. Moving like the wind, like the seagulls in the sea wind, like the wind in the wings of the seagulls in the sky just above the beach on a messy stormy day, he rises and falls with the magic gusting power that can only blow in from some other dimension. Unseen ropes pull him and tug him as sky fall downdrafts seem to weave him in and out of traffic.

It is as if he has never stopped roller skating since the moment he was born.

It’s as if he is being born right here before our very eyes. A second time. A second coming. And this time he is undeniable.

What the fuck.

_____

Something happens and I'm head over heels
I never find out until I'm head over heels
Something happens and I'm head over heels
Ah, don't take my heart, don't break my heart
Don't, don't, don't throw it away

The goosebumps that rain down from the song melody onto my chicken skin in the air-conditioned darkness of this suburban gladiator arena are more real to me now than they were back then.

In certain moments, our lives can be altered and yet, it may take us forever to understand. More often than not, we miss it completely. Then, and only with random luck and a cross breeze we never saw coming, tiny specifics come rattling back across the front porch at us like autumn leaves from long ago. We see them as modern leaves, of course. So they get missed as well. But every now and then, for reasons no one will ever understand, we sit down on the front steps, dejected/ depressed/ searching/ wanting/ wishing/ tired/ bored/ or still unsure about our place in this world and we pick up an old dried leaf and we examine it, arbitrarily.

Then revelations come roaring from beneath it like tiny rattlesnakes. It is, at that moment, as if simply turning it over and peering into the dead veins of something meaningless transcends it’s old form. The memory is jostled by a a memory of it’s own. The melody of some old new wave song. The rush back of the taste of Pepsi mixed with melting machine ice. Taking our kids to the roller rink. The orbs of colored light. The sound of the skates rolling on the wood. The feel of the cinder block walls, painted white, beneath our arms. Our older lamer arms. Think about it. So much life they have known.

Something moving alongside us in time, parallel to our tracking time, it becomes something that moves in a different way. An unconscious memory from a long lost time comes tap-tap-tapping across the scuffed-up paint of a worn-out porch and we flip it over, without intent/ without thought or imagination, and just like that: the thing has this raw encompassing ability to remind us of some forgotten moment, long ago, when we were wrapped in the arms of some other era, some other version of us, some earlier greener chapter of understanding and longing and wishing.

What comes flooding back then is treasure, crashing down upon us, like majestic waves before the storm.

And it moves me.

And I wonder.

What the hell is happening?

_____

I snail myself along the wall, sometimes letting go for a few moments, moving on my own, then drifting back to the safety of the solid edge. All the while, I try to keep my eyes on this kid. I have basically never spoken to him before. I can’t recall any kind of conversation whatsoever. We coexist in these invisible alleys that line our giant high school’s hallways/ dodging each other in the dim channels of space where no one notices us

It is an act of absolute mercy.

This kid throwing all this at me, at us, out of nowhere, out of the dark back corners of his un-kissed existence, it moves my heart and explodes my mind. Back then I had no idea, but I see it all so much clearer now. This kid’s insane mad skills on the rink, jaws dropping. People who know him but don’t really know him. All of us, stood in awe. What can you do? Laugh, I guess. Smile and laugh.

Fuck me.

Say it again.

Well. Fuck. Me.

_____

In my mind's eye
One little boy, one little man
Funny how time flies.

_____

On the ride home, my Pop-Pop lets beer farts move from within his body and out into the world, to the sky, to where I am and I know their scent instantly. It is the ripe weird cheese of his existence. Before too long, he will be gone. Within the next decade and a half, not much time in the grand scheme of things, he will wither and fade and then die.

One day, when I am in my twenties, I will hold his hand once and cry hot tears down onto his unconscious cheeks and kiss his wrinkled old man face and whisper goodbye into his hairy earhole as he lays there in his nursing home bed, still and quiet.

Then, against all odds, he will throw it back in my face. He will live for two more years. And then die, when he’s good and ready, I suppose. When the last hopes of him ever scoring a can of beer have all but evaporated, he will let go and die.

Because: what’s left?

I just don’t know.

On this ride home, cutting down through the warm soft guts of some soon-to-be long lost Saturday afternoon, he is alive and so am I and I am easing through his beer farts as we travel away from the roller rink and down through the cool forests of the wealthier townships on our way back down into the valley of the blue collar peasants where we come from.

We don’t say much.

He smiles his fake teeth at me when I get in the car and he small talks me with how was it bullshit for a minute or two and I oblige him before we both just slip down in our seats and watch the green fertile suburbs slipping away.

The brown Matador is nothingness now yet underneath certain random leaves I still feel the crick in her seats, the sweaty stick of her arm rests. He glides it easy this afternoon. Easy and free. I gag on beer farts. I smile at my own thoughts, the girls I watched, the strange remarkable longing deep down in my bones. Between his legs, where my mom comes from, his beer can sits out in the open like an outlaw’s pistol. Drinking and driving are nothing to him. To him, they are roast beef and horseradish. To the old man, driving down the road in the Matador drinking a warm beer, they are just a another day. Just the war on his mind and his razor-nicked face in the bathroom mirror and those grandsons, me and my brother, standing there in the kitchen, seeing us through the gentle gauze of the warm cream ale. Seeing everything always through some kind of unexpected summer rain.

I think about my afternoon. As we roll out of the tree-infested neighborhoods and down into the treeless ones, the blue sky shows itself overhead and I think about Main Line Big Boobs and Coral Necklace and you know how these things go. I touch myself secretly, press my parachute pants a little in the sweet spot. No harm, no foul.

I see the smiling kid from my class ruling the Earth on the rink. He is a God now in some small way, I suppose. On Monday, back at school, nothing will have changed for him. He will do his thing, the same old shit, smiling at his locker, moving past the pretty girls who look right through him like they look through me.

But I saw what I saw.

I killed a man with blood spurting from my neck this afternoon while I was proper high on Pepsi Cola. And I won the heart of a gorgeous little lady who had never known love like the love I brought her out there in her time of need, when her time of quiet desperation collided with mine as Eyes Without a Face played loud and Coral Necklace’s face went slack.

I saw a 7th grade nobody flying against the rafters of that goddamn skating rink.

He was proof that there is justice for all the Fat Kids and the Zit Kings in this cruel, cruel world.

Once upon a time, in the cool, cool dark of a disco lit world, I watched a superhero being born; in the strange American womb of a 1985 roller rink, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as the synthesizers touched my heart; in the Matador on the way home I sucked down my Pop-Pop’s beer farts; and in my bottom bunk that night, underneath my younger brother staring at his own ceiling with his own sparkling eyes, I breathed in deep, thought of Main Line Big Tits, closed my eyes and drifted off.

And I’m still out there somewhere.

Leaning on a wall, Pepsi breath, and watching.

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