There's Always A Catch To "Free"
Imagine a group of 10 year old boys living on an Air Force base in Hawaii.
I don’t have to imagine, I can remember. (Ha! … sometimes anyway)
I lived in Hawaii (aka paradise) three times, but by far the best was when I was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s.
I had a great group of friends, and on any given summer day my parents probably had no idea where I was from sun up til sundown … and sometimes later than that.
We would ride our bikes over to Pearl Harbor to look at the ships.
Go to AAA baseball games at Aloha Stadium (future Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn played for the Islanders in 1982).
One time we rode The Bus to downtown Honolulu and got out at Hotel Street to see hookers and bums 😲 (we were 10)
Other times we’d just go fishing at the harbor for 11 or 12 hours, trying to catch the big Tiger Shark that was rumored to be trapped in the reef runway lagoon. Luckily we were never successful.
But those are all tales for later posts.
Today I want to tell a story about the time we were sure we’d found a way to cheat the system, or at least the only “system” we knew about at 10.
In the course of our daily adventures, we’d often ride our bikes around the neighborhood, or even the whole base.
Sometimes we’d end up down at the BX (base exchange … department store for you non-military types) after it closed.
We were usually thirsty.
Luckily there were vending machines.
But did I mention we were ten?
Yeah, we didn’t have money.
What we did have though is a friend with a long skinny arm.
Through trial and error, over the course of many evenings we discovered that if we hit the side of the machine just right, then our friend (let’s call him Mikey … he would eat anything) could stick that long skinny arm up into the machine and extract a “free” soda.
Yes, we were technically stealing. But we were thirsty, broke 10 year olds.
This trick would work over and over again; as many cans as we wanted.
One minor technically …
Only one specific type of soda ever came out of the part of the machine that Mikey could reach with his long skinny arm.
.
.
.
.
Yep, it was TAB.
If you’re too young to know why this was horrifying, imagine the most disgusting metallic-aftertaste diet soda you can think of …
TAB was at least 10x worse than that.
But …
We were 10, and it was “free”, so of course we all drank one almost every night for about a month. 🙃
Decades later, I still drink diet soda. But it’s definitely not TAB.
Think someone else might enjoy this post?
Nearer at hand but longer ago, in a circumstance not quite as generally recognized as "paradise," we had a similar situation.
We lived in a "company community," houses owned by the employer, an outfit that dug rocks out of the ground, cooked them and ground them up into lime. Along with regular dynamite blasts, backbreaking labor, substandard housing and the other blessings of poverty, the whole place was covered in dust.
But, what the hell, we were kids and didn't know we were supposed to be downtrodden, so we weren't. Lots of adventure to be had around quarry holes, railroad trestles and heavy equipment, but that is beside the point.
The clockhouse, where workers punched in, had a milk machine. The top opened just like a freezer chest, and the milk cartons were arranged in rows between metal dividers. The process was to select what you wanted, then slide it along between the dividers to the drop-off point. Insert a coin, pull a handle and the half pint of milk would fall into a place were it was accessible.
Unfortunately for bookkeeping, those cartons were already accessible to boys with pocket knives and straws. We'd punch a quick hole, insert a straw, slop it down and then make an escape.
And here is the thing: WE DIDN'T EVEN WANT IT!
Hell, it was milk -- organic TAB.
We only took it because we could!
Great story, Todd!
Add about the same age, my cousin and I discovered a gumball machine that would give us as many gumballs as we wanted if we jerked the handle back-and-forth. We held out our T-shirts into bowls and filled them up!