The man's attention had been drawn by the cry of rubber skidding across cold pavement. He glanced up just in time.

"Boy, that'll loosen the sinuses!" chuckled the onlooker as an old lady and her shopping cart rebounded off the solid front end of a New York taxicab.

Vegetables and prunejuice and boxes of Depend adult diapers spewed from the wayward cart into the intersection. The old lady went bouncing and sliding across the pavement until a streetlight was kind enough to stop her ill-fated journey with its massive, green, steel post.

She looked very peaceful, lying prostrate, head against the pole, in her floral overcoat-type jacket (that only grandmas know where to find) and curlers dangling from her gossamer greyish locks. The ambulance arrived. She had just regained consciousness and was crawling inanely around the intersection groping for her vegetables when the paramedics took her away.

Distracted but briefly, the previously enthralled onlooker resumed selling hot dogs on his busy street corner. While bending over to restore a fallen quarter to his greedy pocket, the haired crevasse between his bulbous cheeks emerged from his two-sizes too large, grey, polyester slacks and announced itself proudly to the world. Because of his growing rotundity, the man was slow to return himself to a standing position... so slow in fact that an energetic lass in high heels and a fashionable business outfit responded alertly and slapped him hard on his bared behind, sending him awkwardly to the cement. As he fell, he sandpapered a layer of flesh off his chin, but he also found a banana from the old lady's shopping cart on the ground before him. Smiling excitedly he pocketed the banana and sold a hot dog to an anxious customer.

The taxicab had disappeared long ago. As it departed down the thoroughfare one could glimpse a bumper sticker on the back of the fleeing taxi saying, "How's My Driving? If you observe this vehicle being driven in a reckless or haphazard manner, please report it to Courteous Cab Service 1-800-EAT-SHIT."

The intersection was now frenzied with activity as ghetto youth, and several men in pin-striped suits, scrambled amongst the screeching, honking cars, picking up whatever they could lay their hands on of the old lady's groceries.

The police finally arrived to clear up the situation. Eight squad cars piled into the intersection with sirens blaring. Sixteen self-important police officers, all wearing mirrored aviator sunglasses, burst from the barely stopped cars and began cuffing anyone they could catch. Mainly they got the ghetto youth, along with several innocent bystanders.

The men in the pin-striped suits were too quick, dodging and ducking, feigning left and darting right. The police didn't have a chance. They couldn't see much through their dark glasses, and weren't about to take them off. On top of that all the Winchell's donuts they had put down in the last week were beginning to weigh heavy in their stomachs, not to mention the heavy flesh on their biceps and thighs that already burdened their movement. The caffeine high they had been on from drinking coffee with their donuts was just petering out, and they were beginning to experience the heinous withdrawal symptoms that they knew so well in the crack and heroine addicts they busted.

Don't let anyone tell you caffeine isn't a drug. Caffeine kills. It ruins lives. You think you know what you're doing, how much you can take and all. But you don't know. You just don't know. You can't see what you're doing to yourself until it's too late.

Take a friend of mine, Dale MacGruder. He used to drink just socially. Then he started to do more and more.

No longer was it just at parties. He'd wake up in the morning to a cup or two. Then he started doing it at lunch, mid-afternoon, late at night so he could stay up to watch stupid flesh flicks. Then he got his girlfriend hooked. Sex vanished from their relationship. They'd sit down together and brew a pot of coffee instead. This was their sex. It was a cathartic, almost religious experience. I knew something was really wrong when Dale forwent the actual brewing process and began to suck straight from the bag.

Dale's in a cell now. He lives, if one could really call it living, a quivering, pale, shrunken mass. A white cement building surrounds his shallow, confined existence. Green hills stand soothingly in the background, an attempt to calm the angry inmates. Roomed with two other deranged men, Dale spends all waking hours trying to pacify the yearning in his soul by sucking brown-colored water through a baby bottle and pretending.

Bob, the man who sells the hot dogs, wished to himself that he had had a camera to film the prior events of the morning. It would have made a good memento, something to show the kids, he thought, as he unscrewed the top to his thermos.

He began to pour the dark, steaming liquid into his favorite clay mug, savoring the luscious odor and watching with a desirous eye the steam waft delightfully into the chilly New York air. He gripped the mug with anticipatory satisfaction and raised it slowly, too slowly, devouring all aspects of his ritual with expectation and an almost inhuman, bestial passion. As the mug touched his lips, he consummated the deed. Coffee poured forth from the mug into his mouth and down his throat. Hope was gone. Bob had stepped onto the physical and emotional rollercoaster ride of sinful debauchery from which there was no getting off. Caffeine had become king, as it does with so many hapless moral degenerates.

See Dale drink. See Dale debauched. See Dale decomposed.
Don't be a Dale.

Back where you came from