Harry’s life of crime started young, ended early.
He can’t pinpoint exactly when his moral compass deviated, pointing in a direction he would ultimately judge shameful. But he can still remember—even taste—the object of his unquenchable desire, the sweet, effervescent flavour of Kik Cola, sparkling on his tongue.
Decades since the brand disappeared into the oblivion of discontinued products, Harry still craves his ‘poison’, and could easily be tempted to wrap his hands around the neck of one of those sculpted bottles to glug down its corrupting contents. But there’s no Kik to be found on grocery store shelves anywhere outside of Harry’s illicit dreams.
If a shady bootlegger or pusher had introduced him to his brand of hooch, Harry would have had someone else to blame for his addiction. But it was his own dad who would plunk a ‘family-sized’ bottle down on the dinner table every Friday to celebrate the end of his work week.
His mother always lectured the two of them against drinking a concoction that was “nothing but sugar and dye dissolved in water that comes out of who-knows-what-well.” But to no avail.
“Why not have a glass of milk instead?” she would plead, as if anything squeezed out of Bess—the family cow—could even come close to the nectar that flowed from a bottle of Kik. Harry looked forward to those Friday dinners as fervently as a man crossing the Sahara might yearn for a glass of water.
Eventually, though, his mother put her foot down, swapping his elixir of Kik with a glass of milk and insisting he drink up. “That’s better, isn’t it?” she pronounced, glaring at Harry’s dad.
Milk, better than Kik Cola? Harry rolled his eyes.
His father commiserated with a shrug and a sad look, but Harry suspected his dad wasn’t too upset because, after all, he’d get more Kik for himself in the bargain… A delusion that was settled when Catherine Sanderson snatched their last bottle of Kik off the table—over the loud protests of her husband—and poured it down the kitchen sink.
“I’ll not have our son tempted every Friday evening by your incorrigible behaviour, Thomas,” she pronounced. “You can go drink your carbonated brew somewhere else, not in this house.”
~~~
Although his father laughed about it and would often tell his exaggerated tale about Mrs. Sanderson’s prohibition at family gatherings, Harry considered his mother’s edict unfair. “What does she know?” he objected. “What’s ‘better’ about milk compared to Kik Cola?”
“Better is a tricky word,” he argued.
And that’s the truth.
How you see it depends on which end of the telescope you view it through and whose telescope you choose. One of the first things any student of philosophy learns, especially when you’re talking about moral matters, is that ‘better’ can be hammered into any shape to fit just about any purpose. Harry didn’t need a university degree to figure that out. Even as a kid, he knew as much.
His appreciation of history would never go back much farther than the industrial revolution, and it ends pretty well with the invention of television… certainly by the time Neil Armstrong took his ‘one giant leap for mankind’ onto the surface of the moon. After that, the deluge of history-in-the-making overwhelmed him. But the one constant he perceived in ‘all that bombast and nonsense’ was the barrage of meanings that could be crammed into every word, especially that plastic catch-all, ‘better’.
“You can label almost anything ‘better’ or even ‘best’,” Harry says. All you need is the money and marketing savvy to convince the gullible that the label’s been earned. From there, it wasn’t much of a leap to the conclusion that the word ‘better’ didn’t really have any significance at all—that it could be affixed in beaten brass with copperplate type onto locomotives, belt buckles, bicycles, lunar modules, any thing.
In fact, you didn’t even need the word ‘better’ to announce the superiority of your product or invention. All you had to do was design a catchy logo and stamp it onto every conceivable surface that might be seen by a human eyeball, next to the image of smiling models with perfect teeth, and your ‘target audience’ would know exactly what you implied.
Kik Cola’s brand was plastered onto clocks, thermometers, carryalls, ice boxes, shop signs, always underlined with the slogan ‘Drink Kik, The Family Cola’… In the fifties, even ‘The Pocket Rocket’, Henri Richard, tried to entice Harry out of his abstinence with the line, “At home, we prefer Kik to the high-price Colas!” There he was, Harry’s hero, on a billboard, pouring himself a tumbler of ‘the cola for all the family’.
How could you argue with that?
Especially when the undeniably delicious tingle of Kik slithered down your esophagus!
Harry didn’t even try.
Next: Just for Kiks – Part 2