Review: The Grassy Embankment Outside Pohatcong Package Place
There were several years, in the late seventies, when I would walk there from my house on summer afternoons in order to buy a bottle of Yoo Hoo chocolate drink and, depending on my mood, either a bag of corn-based onion-flavored snacks that were not, but were similar to, Funyuns (probably the Utz brand rings), or a package of Slim Jims. On the way there, I would typically 1) scan the pavement for interesting bottle caps; 2) try to avoid the neighborhood bullies, especially Pete Rossnagle, of the Rossnagle Service Station Rossnagles; 3) pop, with my fingers, rising bubbles of exposed road tar; 4) think about Atari; 5) think about baseball; 6) think about how to non-destructively mount my bottle cap collection onto a piece of plywood. (It’s worth noting that, despite the profound intensity of these experiences, and the then-impossibility of imagining life without them, I no longer do any of them, with the possible exception of thinking about Atari, which I actually did the other day, when I tried to remember the correct series of actions that revealed the “Warren Robinette” easter egg in “Adventure”.)
When I arrived at Pohatcong Package Place, I would reach into my pocket and pull out my allowance money. Then I’d open the door and step into the air-conditioned, busy closeness of the place. Pohatcong Package Place was a liquor store. It’s gone now. It couldn’t have occupied more than 500 square feet, despite clearly having been originally designed as a residence—a little brick bungalow, probably of 1930’s design. What was once probably a sharply sloped front hard had been dug down to street level to create a small parking lot, surrounded by grassy embankments. Behind the counter stood Nick Varhal, the owner of Pohatcong Package Place. He would, years later, become my baseball coach, the one who made the whole team run multiple laps around the outfield if anyone uttered the word “rain,” the one who eventually snuffed out my interest in baseball (although, in his defense, my love of sports would probably have waned without his help).
A sloppy, overweight man with a sardonic manner, Nick Varhal would pretend to be annoyed to see a child in his liquor store, and would issue vague threats, including the possible embargo of Yoo Hoo and Slim Jims, if I didn’t watch myself. If another, adult, customer were in the store, he would put on a little “neighborhood crank” act for that person, stepping up the snark (a term that existed, but was not in common use, in late-seventies America) and mocking my snack choices. His warnings weren’t entirely desultory—there was so much stuff in the store, packed into such narrow aisles, that a spastic child could legitimately cause a huge mess. I loved it—the arrangement of high painted-wire snack racks and green aluminum shelves crowded with booze informed and inspired my eventual taste for artfully arranged clutter. So I tried to control my physical impulses during the two minutes or so I stood there.
When I abandoned the comfortable discomfort of the PPP, and returned to the summer heat, I would walk over to the embankment that supported a single crabapple tree, and I would sit under the tree and eat my snacks with my non-tarry fingers and examine whatever bottle caps I’d found, and sniff their beery plastisol seals. (Why were there so many lying in the road? Did people have a lot of barbecues in those days? Did teenagers throw bottle caps out of moving cars?) There were twenty-one teeth on a crown cork bottle cap, and usually a single bend where a bottle opener had prised it away from the beer bottle’s flange. You would try to straighten the cap for your collection, but you couldn’t. If my bottle-cap friend was with me, we’d talk about bottle caps, but if not, I’d merely think about them and fondle them.
I don’t recall my bottle-cap friend’s name. Bottle caps were his only function. We didn’t have any other shared interests and didn’t talk about anything else. Once a deer jumped through the plate-glass front window of his house, ran through the living room and kitchen, smashed through the kitchen window, and drowned and bled to death in his pool. Later, he gave me his entire bottle cap collection—he’d outgrown the hobby. I was elated, for a couple of days. Then I realized that learning it was possible to outgrow a hobby had caused me to outgrow the hobby as well.
I joined Nick’s baseball team. Then I quit. I got interested in girls, and eventually married one. I haven’t had a Slim Jim or Yoo Hoo since the early nineties. But I still like sitting on grass and under trees, and sometimes I’ll eat a small bag of Funyuns. Fact: the inventor of Funyuns was a man named Ray Trinidad. Fact: you can find the “Adventure” easter egg by securing the one-pixel gray dot from the wall of the sealed chamber in the black castle, then carrying it through the invisible wall at the east end of the corridor below the golden castle.
Four stars.
★ ★ ★ ★
