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I know this is a serious discussion, but your comment tweaked my memory.

I used to be able to get alcohol from a vending machine! Of course, I was only fourteen and that was the only way I was going to get it. I lived on a military base, and at the swimming pool I frequented on the base, they had beer vending machines with Schlitz it it, as I recall.

But I had no money. What I did have was time and persistence, and I figured out how to stick my arm up inside the thing and get a can out...:) I did get enough out to get drunk, and one time, not to a good end.

We would go down and mill around late at night after the pool was closed up. All the boards on the front of the snack bar were up and locked, and we lounged around the picnic tables under the open concrete patio with the roof above it. Some of the others smoked cigarettes, but I didn’t. Didn’t have enough money, and even though occasionally I would try one and assume the air I thought people had to assume to smoke, I just couldn’t justify the money.

Anyway, that was where we hung out, and it was far enough away on that little base that the old guy “Pops” Soule, who was a civilian in his sixties performing security on that little base, would go down there only once or twice in an evening on his rounds. We could see him coming in the truck and would just get behind something and he would drive by. He was a nice guy. Everyone liked him.

So the pool would open in mid or late May, and in the weeks before it opened, they would fill it with water and chemicals and we would just jump in wearing all our clothes (including shoes) as soon as the water acquired a fainter shade of green.

It was behind chain link fencing, but we just climbed over and went swimming early in the season before the pool was officially open. I remember doing a flip off the board, fully clothed, ending up in the water completely disoriented, just hovering there underwater with the dim light of a nearby streetlight the only illumination. It did cross my mind that diving boards, closed pools, and alcohol were a bad combination.

Another time, there were probably five or ten of us, and I had purloined enough beer to give me a good buzz, and I stepped on top of a manhole cover. It was one of those thick metal corrugated pipes sticking about a foot out of the ground with a cast iron manhole cover placed on top.

I wasn’t thinking anything of it, and decided to make it my platform and stepped onto it.

Before I could react, the thing gave way, and the next thing I recalled was having one of my kneecaps pressed into my face, my armpits on the sides, and my torso and other leg dangling in the black, unknown depth of the pipe.

My friends hauled me out, and upon viewing my bloody legs, were insistent that I go to the base dispensary. This was probably approaching midnight. So, I went to the base dispensary in the same building the base theater was in, and it was unsurprisingly closed. It was, after all, a very small Naval communication station.

But there was a phone that said if you needed help, to call this number, and it rang the nearby house of the young base doctor, a Lieutenant Winer, who also happened to socialize with my parents.

He was a slender guy with back hair, black moustache, blue eyes, and round glasses. He was also a very nice guy.

He showed up, peered at my bleeding legs that had the skin scraped off the shins on both sides, and unlocked the door. (I have never been able to figure out how my leg that had my kneecap in my face got badly scraped, but it had.)

He sat me down, pulled over a chair for me to put my legs on, and spread some plastic sheeting on the floor under my legs. He looked me in face and said “Have you been drinking?” I slurred that I had not, and I distinctly remember a nearly silent “Mmhmm” emanating from his pursed lips.

He had a bottle of mercurochrome in a small dark brown bottle in his hand, and looking full into my face, he poured the contents of the bottle over my bloody shins. I didn’t even blink. I don’t remember what happened after that, and there were no repercussions, so he must not have told my dad.

And the cigarette machines. I remember them, a large glass front, usually with some kind of baked enamel finish, an odd shade of metallic green, with the vending tray running from one side to the other.

Above the tray, there were smooth, polished knobs of glass or metal for you to pull out. Above each one was a pack of cigarettes. The ever present Marlboro. Kools. Pall Mall. Camel.

And when you put your money in, you grabbed a knob and pulled it out. There was a satisfying friction, almost as if you had to work for your cigarettes to make them better.

And when they dropped down, there was a book of matches that dropped with them.

I never smoked. But I was fascinated with the machines, and when my parents woud get them, I would offer to pull the knob out to vend the cigarettes.