Many enemies have I battled over the years. Rowdy Roddy Pipeman. Varicose veins. Sergio, the hunky Venezuelan yoga instructor who enjoyed shiva squatting with my wife just a little too much.
But my greatest fight has always been against the irresistible allure of artificially flavoured carbonated beverages.
Fizzy drinks. Pop. Soda, if you may.
Dr Pepper was my mistress. Tall, dark and syrupy, I nestled in her cherried embrace for several years. My waistline ballooned, my teeth rotted out of my head, and I wound up with some really quite grotesque facial acne that caused children to flee at the very sight of me.
Why did you think I wore the mask?
Not even at my lowest point, when I roamed the sultry streets of Salt Lake City begging for loose change to buy just one more can of sugar water, could I break up with Pepper. Then, after an unsavoury incident in the refreshment aisle of a local supermarket, the big house came calling.
During a five year stretch, I found a new addiction – The Book of Mormon.
Well, that and my cellmate Elijah’s coconut macaroons. They’re just soooooo good!
My name is Santiago Smith. I am the world’s only mormon luchador, and this is the story of my pilgrimage to The Giant Soda Cans in Salinas, Utah – and the sugar high that almost cost me my life.
Who can take a sunrise
Sprinkle it with Mountain Dew Diet Coke
Cover it with chocolate and a miracle or two?
The Can Man
Oh, the Can Man can
The Can Man can ’cause he mixes it with love
And makes Utah taste good
Decades after kicking my sordid soda habit, the sanguine zest of an icy-cold can of Dr Pepper still haunted my dreams. It was all I could think about, and my fizzy fantasies became wilder by the day. I became moribund, irritable, and more than a little aloof.
One time, I was so frazzled that I forgot to return my VHS copy of Nacho Libre until several days after the due date. The clerk – Raymond – was not impressed.
I had to face my calorie-dense demons, or die trying. The best way to do that was by tracking down an outrageously oversized drink container or two.
Yes, I could’ve gone to The World’s Largest Coca-Cola Bottle, but my good friend Bigs Bardot has already written about that, so a 14-hour round-trip to Salina it was.
The four soda cans rise like sepultures in the high desert; mourning, perhaps, a United States long since lost. One used to be painted like a jar of Dr Pepper, but by the time I arrived, they’d been repainted in the irrepressible designs of Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Sprite and – most egregious of all – Monster energy drink.
“Oh well, beggars can’t be choosers” I shrugged, leaning in to guzzle Sprite from a hose sticking out the side of a colossal can.
“Yucky!” I recoiled, liquid oozing from the mouth-hole of my silver mask. “That’s not soda – that’s gasoline!”
The drink was pungent but, in a way, it felt like home. As I gulped down mouthfuls of the heavily-refined nectar, all my worries disappeared.
Of course, I ended up with some really quite unpleasant internal haemorrhaging. But those few moments of peace were worth the lifetime of agony.
But, when you think about it, that was probably better for my health than drinking a can of Monster energy drink.
