BeeKeeper's Delight

During my formative years I spent countless hours down at Shafer’s drugstore standing online just to get my hands around a tall cool pint of BeeKeeper's Delight. It truly was a titillating and classy brew. Riddled with honey and mint, and with a huge foamy head - every right thinking child this side of Colfax St. was just crazy for the stuff. The rich foam would produce a long-lasting pasty Day-Glo green mustache on your face after you drank it. It must have driven the parents totally ape-shit to see their kids walking around for a week, or more in some cases, with green tainted skin on their upper lip. The only way to avoid this was to drink it through those paper candy cane stripy straws - but there wasn’t much fun in that was there? Every Sunday like clockwork, just as the chiming bells rang out from St. Dominic's - Sister Sara and I rise from our twin beds, anxiously dress and lace up our sneakers – skipping breakfast we would rush out of the house zigzagging down the street with our arms in the air, all wide-eyed and grinning as we made our way to the drugstore. We would waste away the day letting loose in the Dragon Fly Fields, dreaming of rainbow dust and whatever wild visions would be conjured in our preschool aged minds. Sister Sara would roar out wild pontifications on God and Zen - her shrill cries leaving me totally breathless and begging for more - all the while questioning my own half-evolved sense of what it means to be human. It was years later when the city health inpector came and shut down Shafer’s. Somehow word had gotten out that BeeKeeper’s Delight was heavily laced with PCP – it was no wonder that what we thought were just innocent childhood dreams were actually brought on by a chemical hallucinogen that created severe neurological effects to our still developing minds. There are people who'd like me to say that I look back on those days with contempt, that I renounce old Schafer for exposing us to all of this. But the truth is that he opened my eyes to new dreams and he gave me a great gift – the gift of true mind freedom. I stroll through the world today a stronger man as a result of my experiences with BeeKeeper's Delight – and even though I will most certainly have a few decades shaved off of my life and my weakened heart still quivers uncontrollably in the middle of the night, I can say this to you now with and honest face and with all the certainty that my spirit can muster - it was well worth it.