Get Thee to a Mini-Mart!
Have you ever been to a mini-mart?
Maybe they’re called bodegas or corner stores where you live.
Have you ever been? Of course you have. Who hasn’t been to a mini-mart?
Did your mini-mart have Hunt Brother’s pizza? Did it have hand-dipped ice cream, shelves stacked with candy you couldn’t find at the gas station, and 20-year-old boxes of Band-Aids?
Well, mine did. So, now you can fill your glass of envy from my pitcher today.
When I was of proper bike-riding age, I lived in Milton, Indiana, a tiny little town sandwiched between the metropolises of Connersville and Cambridge City, along State Road 1, not far from the Ohio border. Being of bike-riding age was important because if we all rode our bikes to the mini-mart—with change we had “borrowed” from our parents’ change jars and key shelves—we could make it back to the garage before the cheese went cold on our pizza. That is, if the cheese wasn’t already cold when it was pulled from its spinning glass display case at which we would ogle as the first visually desirous subject of our adolescence.
A lot of days we’d walk though. Weekends and summer days when our parents were busy living their lives, working, or locking us out of the house, the five or six of us (roughly 50% of the under-15 population in town) would walk up River Street, take a left onto Main for a block and then scream as we sprinted across the state highway, praying a passing car didn’t leave us a soon-to-be-forgotten stain on the hot asphalt, a cautionary tale to all future sojourners. Our fear was not death; it was our mothers finding out we had died twelve feet outside our agreed upon boundary. While we weren’t technically allowed to go to the mini-mart without express permission on the day-of, the unwritten rule was “don’t die and you won’t get in trouble when you get home.” Ahh…90s moms.
The feeling an eleven-year-old boy is overcome by when hearing the ding of a mini-mart door opening and the smell of once-warmed pizza and dirty tile floors wafting across his still-baby-fatted face is akin only to the feeling a mother has when holding her child for the first time. I can think of nothing else these two feelings would better match but one another. And, for my money, the mini-mart is the superior of the two experiences because there’s no mucus, meconium, or episiotomies. Well, maybe some. But not enough to complain about!
Once inside, the unencumbered excitement begins to wane as the reality of one’s budget sets in.
$5 and you’re a king. That’s a slice of pizza, an ice cream cone, and a candy bar.
$7 and you’re a mark. It’s too much. The kid with the smallest budget or the biggest audacity will sidle up and ask to go halfsies on a piece of pizza so he can get everything else he wants, or he’ll ask if you can spot him for his 20 oz bottle of Mr. Pibb. Excuse me, friend. Please take your sinful offer to someone in the fourth grade. Middle School Tid ain’t touching that.
But $3. That’s where men are made. Where the wheat is separated from the chaff. With $3, you have to decide what is truly important in life—quantity or quality. $3 can get you three candy bars and can of soda. Maybe a Little Debbie, too. MAYBE. But this is far too much sugar to be throwing down your gullet right before a seven-inning game of Wiffle Ball.
Now, $3 could also get you a double scoop of ice cream and a slice of pizza. Not a bad afternoon. But you have to consider the experience you’re going to get. You don’t want to scarf down a couple scoops of rocky road and a piece of pepperoni pizza with nothing to drink. You’re going to be left with greasy lips and that weird chocolate-pepperoni-pre-vomit milkiness in your mouth. And what drinks do you have waiting for you back in the garage? Store brand soda—Dr. Thunder, Mountain Quinch, and Coker-Doodle-Doo.
Why? Because the soda police in your home found that every neighborhood kid would raid your parents’ fridge, taking Coca-Cola and Mountain Dew into the garage and around the yard, leaving them half-full and mostly-warm after lunch. This—leaving half-empty cans of real soda spread about—was a cardinal sin in my family. Still is. The only way the cola courts found to correct such behavior was to buy the cheapest, shittiest, syrupiest soda on the market and then relegating us and the nearly-carbonated caramelized sugar drink to the garage, banded together in holy disappointment. If we drank it, great. If we didn’t, fine. At least we weren’t invading the name brand stash.
But back to the budget!
$3.00
What do you do with $3? You do this:
Slice of pizza. Duh. A boy’s gotta eat.
Now, you’re down to a buck. What are you gonna do with a buck?
You grab a can of Big Red for $0.75 and a Fudge Round for another quarter.
The perfect meal.
Tax free, you’re walking out with a proper lunch and the greatest cough-syrup-flavored soda in the Midwest to wash it all down. Added bonus: there’s nothing smoother than a Big Red, after-lunch belch.
Back at the garage, everyone takes a seat and for four glorious minutes, there’s only the sound of chomping, gasps for breath, and the occasional crack-crunch-fizz of a K-Mart brand soda can tab being opened.
And for an afternoon, we lived as kings.
-AT
