Tonight's Poet Corner: Beverage Of Choice
Beverage Of Choice by Belinda Roddie He drinks his glass of orange juice, then remembers at the very last minute that he doesn't like orange juice, and his mouth puckers from the power of a thousand Florida orchards. When he asks for iced tea, his butler reminds him that he hasn't had a sip of iced tea since he caught his wife in bed with a rival golfer and a tall Arnold Palmer in her slick, bedazzled fist. So he demands a good old-fashioned beer instead. "It's eight in the morning," says his butler, but his boss won't hear a word of it. He lets the carbonation roil his stomach like an old, cracked cauldron. His inner pipes don't work the way they used to, yet he belches loudly and laughs as if he were nine years old again, challenging his older brother to chug a cola or two by the baseball diamond without stopping to take a single, necessary breath.