The Drink of the Summer is a Coke Shower

Stealth sponcon to elevate your consumption experience

Starting around 7th or 8th grade, I took up the kind of charmingly contrived habit thirteen-year-old boys often take up — particularly thirteen-year-old boys who combine misguided self-assurance with extravagant stupidity, which would include a lot.

I was their Huckleberry.

Every day after the drive home from school, a journey of no more than a half-mile in my mother’s gas-gormandizing Ford Expedition, I’d walk into the kitchen, drop my carefully distressed, navy blue Jansport backpack on the floor, open the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and thumb through local and national happenings — the whereabouts of Eric Rudolph, the coming Anthrax apocalypse, the rumors of war in some far-flung place called Iraq, or was it Afghanistan? — until reaching the Sports section — steroids, Michael Vick, Michael Vick’s broken leg. The Sports section was all I really wanted, but such boorish media preferences threatened to upend my masquerade of maturity. Still the act was salvageable. After all, I knew (and know) plenty of dads who would’ve skipped straight to the box scores too. Maybe all I’d need to save face was to brew a pot of instant coffee, or if I wanted to take my character in another direction, sip some tea. Given the time of day, tea would’ve made a lot of sense.

But no.

Instead, settling down at the kitchen table with the only pages I could actually comprehend, I would pop open a can of Coke, unwrap a pack of two half-stale Frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts — always raw, never toasted — and consume enough high fructose corn syrup to send a fully grown raccoon into a diabetic coma. Still, even at that point, there might’ve been a chance to limit the damage. A teenage stomach is uniquely resilient, and as my half-finished-Picasso-line-drawing-excuse-for-a-body could attest, my metabolism was uniquely efficient. How about a glass of water?

No.

Instead, because I often ate the Pop Tarts at an alarming speed, my stomach didn’t have time to let my brain know I was full, meaning I often double-dipped on Pop Tarts packs, meaning a final tally of four dusty, oblong wafers, filled with artificial cinnamon, paired with a Coke, every weekday afternoon. Prepare the potion, imbibe the potion, suffer the potion. That was my ritual. And that remains my version of Proust’s madeleine: the slush of sugars coating my teeth and sapping my gums sore; the synthetic morass of solids and liquids transmogrifying into a grainy, unnatural paste that tasted a little like I’d gone to the beach and dropped my snack into a flooded sandcastle.

I don’t know. Maybe my taste buds were simply overwhelmed. Or maybe there are certain things that we simply shouldn’t ask our tongues to do.

Either way, an alarming amount of time passed until I dropped the habit, and even longer until I took up a new one. Eventually that new habit came to be known as a Coke Shower.

The Coke Shower is based on three premises, the first of which features in nearly every Coke advertisement I know: when you drink a Coke, you partake in an experience — like most products, the thing itself is somewhat secondary. Next, the best way to drink a Coke is over ice in a glass — a controversial point, but a crucial one. Finally, the most important part of the Coke experience occurs within the first few seconds. Starbucks hits on a similar idea with the meme-y “that first sip feeling.” But with Coke, the experience begins before the first sip. First, the sound: the metallic pop of the can, the mute fizz of the bottle. Then the pour, and the bubbles, and the vapors that rise to meet your face in cool, candied airs. A shower that washes and makes whole...

Shower? I can’t remember if I invented the name; it may have been a roommate. Maybe there are more accurate images: a spray, a vaporizer, a bidet. But I like Coke Shower, curious and provocative and vaguely scandalizing. Cheers.

How To Make a Coke Shower

1. Get a Coke.

2. Fill a glass with ice.

3. Bringing your nose to the rim of your glass, slowly but steadily pour the Coke over the ice and inhale, allowing the fizz to wash and spray your nasal passage. The pace of the pour is important: the longer the pour, the longer the shower.

4. Taking care to not wipe away any residue from your face — common splash areas include the nose, upper lip, and around the eyes — drink the Coke. To pair, avoid sweets and consider a savory option, like Goldfish Flavor Blasted Xtra Cheddar.

Correction: A previous version of this post identified the Pop Tarts as Cinnamon Toast. As it turns out, there is no Cinnamon Toast flavored Pop Tart. We regret the error.