This beer serves as a belated appreciation of summer, since I picked it up in the first days of the Fall season. For some reason it reminded me of my childhood, when summer used to be worth a shit. The closing of the school year meant the opening of the Weehawken public pool, the holiest body of water since the Ganges. We would all meet up down the block, with our beach towels wrapped around our handlebars and ride our bikes down into Weehawken, which we considered enemy territory, since they looked down on us Union City dirtbags as if we were Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande into Texas.
Along the way, we would stop at a crab apple tree that adorned the front yard of an apartment complex and climb it's branches to stock up on some ammunition to throw at cars later on during the day. Once this waspy jogger came up to our little crew and warned us that crab apples would give us cramps. What he got was a headache as I hurled an apple at his head as he jogged back along his route. He was probably listening to Phil Collins on his walkman. I don't remember who got the blame for that one, since I was the first and only one to haul ass quickly after that.
One kid in our group, Oscar, had the habit of sticking his penis into the bubble holes at the side of the pool. As much as he tried to play it cool, the lifeguards knew of his raping of their beloved watering hole, and would often taunt and call him out loudly on his foul, unsanitary fetish before pulling him out for the remainder of the afternoon. He would go home defeated, only to come back the next day with a hard-on for chlorine. The lifeguards never banned him from the pool, I guess they got a kick out of humiliating him, and would even allow him a few intimate moments with the pool's filtration system before taking action. We would usually be out of the pool by then, drying ourselves and counting how many quarters we had for the Double Dragon machine at the pizzeria down the block.
The old lech adorning this beer label would have taken a liking to Oscar. Just looking at her face makes me feel molested. Pure prehistoric lust curving those Metamucil-sucking lips into a coy grin. Underneath the picture the caption: "C'mon in, the water is great!" would have taken a whole new meaning. But I bet Oscar would have come in alright. If he could stick his dick into a pool filter, he could stick it into anything, no matter how cold, hard, or lethal it may be. He was a real trooper.
