I had a dream that I went to a bar and ordered a Heineken. It was the sort of bar where I felt self-conscious about drinking imported beer, so I didn’t say anything when I was given a Corona. “Five dollars,” said the bartender, which I immediately surrendered, even though the bottle was oddly-shaped, with a pencil-thin neck and a base that held about two ounces of liquid.
Moving away from the bar with my Corona, I remembered that Corona should properly be garnished with lime. It’s a universal law, right? So I went back to the bar and asked for a lime.
“You want a lime?” the surly bartender asked. “Okay, let me find one.” He started rifling through a series of dusty wooden drawers.
“She already has lime!” called a heavy woman who sat previously unnoticed behind the bar.
I looked at my beer. It had morphed into a bowl of beer, and indeed swimming within were a half-dozen so pieces of lime.
“I meant lime juice,” I sweated. “Do you have any lime juice?”
I looked again at my beer. It was a gigantic punch bowl, replete with not only lime but apple slices, pineapple chunks, and whole bananas still in the peel. The bartender squeezed a green plastic lime over the bowl and I thanked him.
Picking up the bowl with two hands, I wandered away into the night. I was in a city street that curved sharply to the right and was flanked with high, toppling snow banks. A young woman was walking in the street, as pedestrians are wont to do when the sidewalks are covered in slushy ice, and white van honked furiously at her. She indignantly moved to the side, and I started throwing fruit at the van: Bananas, saturated pineapple, and lime, all flying in the air at the van. People on the street stopped to stare at me.
“What are you drinking?” asked another pedestrian as my beer sloshed out of the bowl to the ground around me.
“Corona,” I said, even though the liquid was punch-red and non-carbonated. “But I don’t know where I’m drinking it.”
