11/22/63: A Novel

It was the Kennebec Fruit Company, which was certainly a grandiose name for a store that had been tottering on the edge of oblivion-or so it seemed to me-for the ten years I’d been teaching at LHS. Its unlikely raison d’etre and only means of survival was Moxie, that weirdest of soft drinks. The proprietor of the Fruit Company, an elderly sweet-natured man named Frank Anicetti, had once told me the world’s population divided naturally (and probably by genetic inheritance) into two groups: the tiny but blessed elect who prized Moxie above all other potables… and everybody else. Frank called everybody else “the unfortunately handicapped majority.”

The Kennebec Fruit Company of my time was a faded yellow-and-green box with a dirty show window barren of goods… unless the cat that sometimes sleeps there is for sale. The roof is swaybacked from many snowy winters. There’s little on offer inside except for Moxie souvenirs: bright orange tee-shirts reading I’VE GOT MOXIE!, bright orange hats, vintage calendars, tin signs that looked vintage but were probably made last year in China. For most of the year the place is devoid of customers, most of the shelves denuded of goods… although you can still get a few sugary snack foods or a bag of potato chips (if you like the salt-and-vinegar kind, that is). The soft-drink cooler is stocked with nothing but Moxie. The beer cooler is empty.

Each July, Lisbon Falls hosts the Maine Moxie Festival. There are bands, fireworks, and a parade featuring-I swear this is true-Moxie floats and local beauty queens dressed in Moxie-colored tank bathing suits, which means an orange so bright it can cause retinal burns. The parade marshal is always dressed as the Moxie Doc, which means a white coat, a stethoscope, and one of those funky mirrors on a headband. Two years ago the marshal was LHS principal Stella Langley, and she’ll never live it down.

During the festival, the Kennebec Fruit Company comes alive and does excellent business, mostly provided by bemused tourists on their way to the western Maine resort areas. The rest of the year it is little more than a husk haunted by the faint odor of Moxie, a smell that has always reminded me-probably because I belong to the unfortunately handicapped majority-of Musterole, the fabulously stinky stuff my mother insisted on rubbing into my throat and chest when I had a cold.

What I was looking at now from the far side of the Old Lewiston Road was a thriving business in the prime of life. The sign hung over the door (FRESH UP WITH 7-UP on top, WELCOME TO THE KENNEBEC FRUIT CO. below) was bright enough to throw arrows of sun at my eyes. The paint was fresh, the roof unbowed by the weather. People were going in and coming out. And in the show window, instead of a cat…

Oranges, by God. The Kennebec Fruit Company once sold actual fruit. Who knew?

I started across the street, then pulled back as an inter-city bus snored toward me. The route sign above the divided windshield read LEWISTON EXPRESS. When the bus braked to a stop at the railroad crossing, I saw that most of the passengers were smoking. The atmosphere in there must have been roughly akin to the atmosphere of Saturn.

Once the bus had gone on its way (leaving behind a smell of half-cooked diesel to mix with the rotten-egg stench belching from the Worumbo’s stacks), I crossed the street, wondering briefly what would happen if I were hit by a car. Would I blink out of existence? Wake up lying on the floor of Al’s pantry? Probably neither. Probably I would just die here, in a past for which a lot of people probably felt nostalgic. Possibly because they had forgotten how bad the past smelled, or because they had never considered that aspect of the Nifty Fifties in the first place.

A kid was standing outside the Fruit Company with one black-booted foot cocked back against the wood siding. The collar of his shirt was turned up at the nape of his neck, and his hair was combed in a style I recognized (from old movies, mostly) as Early Elvis. Unlike the boys I was used to seeing in my classes, he sported no goatee, not even a flavor patch below the chin. I realized that in the world I was now visiting (I hoped I was only visiting), he’d be kicked out of LHS for showing up with even a single strand of facial hair. Instantly.

I nodded to him. James Dean nodded back and said, “Hi-ho, Daddy-O.”

I went inside. A bell jingled above the door. Instead of dust and gently decaying wood, I smelled oranges, apples, coffee, and fragrant tobacco. To my right was a rack of comic books with their covers torn off- Archie, Batman, Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, Tales from the Crypt. The hand-printed sign above this trove, which

would have sent any eBay aficionado into paroxysms, read COMIX 5? EA THREE FOR 10? NINE FOR A QUARTER PLEASE DON’T HANDLE UNLESS YOU INTEND TO BUY.