Hillis Liquor
January 24th, 2014 § 1 Comment
Through the glass door adorned with various beer ads and other non-descript stickers to a slight incline onto the main floor. On the left were the two top sliding glass door freezers packed with bags of ice and ice cream; on the right was the back of a small, waist level news stand … no, really a magazine rack. All I remember of it were the Hustler and Playboys tucked away in the corner … forbidden fruit blinking neon on the drab tree. Beyond it was the wall of liquor. Literally, a wall – front to back , top to bottom, a distilled menagerie of the establishment’s namesake. To a ten year old boy, it might as well have been decorative … the sweet tooth there long before a taste for spirits.
Sometime around 1980, my Mom and Dad bought their first business. Being Korean immigrants, naturally they bought a liquor store. The thought of that store still fills me with that warm, bountiful feeling of anticipation … you know that feeling you get as you step into your favorite “all you can shove down” buffet. Yeah, that feeling. I still see the afternoon lighting coming through the store front windows, the lighting of my after school foraging. Oh, and the happy dilemma: “Do I go Mars bar or Snickers? And do I couple that with RC Cola or Pepsi? or do I just go crazy today and grab that Big Stick that always seems to call my name.”
My first time in Hillis Liquor, as it dawned on me that by extension all this was mine, I remember feeling that in some small way I’d arrived in life. Candy, soda, Big Stick, Funyuns, and porn: I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
Ah man…I still remember the smell of that place. Brings back fond memories. Gap Band, K-Swiss, Black Belt magazine, Palms Junior High. Some of the best years of my life.