Convenience Bore

7-Eleven

107 East 23rd St. (Park Ave.)

212-599-9025

Lo and behold, I have once more underestimated the power of nostalgic kitsch. Last Monday (7/11, to be exact), a 7-Eleven convenience store fired up a Slurpee machine in Manhattan. Relocated Midwesterners, their mitochondrial DNA imprinted with a yen for self-serve drinks, flocked like lapsed junkies. Gorged lines blobbed onto the sidewalk. Machines ran dry of frozen Mountain Dew, Coke and even raspberry Crystal Light. Kids in do-rags traded folded slices of pizza for quarter-pound Big Bite hot dogs, covered in a chemical spill of yellow cheese. Why is history doomed to repeat?

Back in the 70s and 80s, 7-Elevens dotted Manhattan as incongruously as the ear once grown on that mouse's back. Whither the gas pumps, the surly teens getting drunk on illicitly bought booze, the idling automobiles? That New York generation did not take kindly to the convenience stores, and they vanished by 1982. (Note: Brooklyn's nether regions still contain two 7-Eleven stores). A few specially licensed stragglers hung around until around 1990. Then it was back to Korean delis and bodegas selling dusty Bud 40s.

Yet the last 10 years have seen the mallification (and mollification) of Manhattan. Gap, Burger King, Olive Garden: the provinces of highway-exit culture are usurping the mom-and-pop. These suburban refugees (neither the first nor the last) have left the fly-over desert, settling in skyscrapers and tenements. This red-and-green 7-Eleven, as befitting its Interstate-friendly forebears, sits inches from NYC's highway exit-the 6 train at 23rd. On a recent Tuesday afternoon, a steady throng of sundress-wearing college students, cops and a random elderly couple with matching canes pour into the convenience store.

"It's in the middle of the city. It doesn't feel right," says a girl with strawberry hair, perusing an array of beef jerky the size of horsewhips. She is elbowed aside by throngs transfixed by Big Gulps and brain-freezing Slurpees. Red-vested clerks with names containing sharp consonants dash around hurriedly like waiters on opening night.

"I looooove cherry," says a waif, who fills her cup but halfway. Fool. Any suburbanite worth his salt knows Slurpee goo should kiss the top of the domed plastic lid. Nearby, a New York Times photographer flashes away, capturing a zeitgeist-y moment of liquid-induced lust. The shark, having just entered the water, has been leapt.

On the other side of the fluorescent-lit shop sit laboratory-created meats: cigar-size $ Go-Go Taquitos (flavored with jalapeños, cream cheese and chipotle chicken!) and shiny Big Bite hot dogs, rotating endlessly on silver heating coils, the meat greasier than a weightlifter oiled up for competition.

Since I ostensibly review the city's finer dram shops, I investigate the alcohol selection. Two words: Bud and Coors. While even my bulletproof-glass bodega now sells Sierra Nevada and Brooklyn Lager, 7-Eleven's exoticness ends at $1.69 Sparks. Twenty-four-ounce Bud big boys are an inflated $1.99, while the malt liquor selection is woefully inadequate: The limbo pole goes no lower than Steel Reserve. This is not the 7-Eleven of my youth, land of Crazy Horse and Lazer 40-ouncers.

Duty-bound to drink, I grab Budweiser's new super-chilled aluminum bottle ($1.69) and a 22-ounce Coke Slurpee ($1.39).

"I.D., please," said a man with a sweaty brow and the convenience store's ubiquitous red vest. His name is Ashok.

My age is proven acceptable. We have a transaction. Then Ashok deposits my beer in a plastic bag. Yes, a plastic bag.

"Ahem."

"Yes."

"How about a brown paper bag?"

Ashok looks confused, like I asked him to name the capital of Kazakhstan (it's Astana!). No respectable bodega would send a thirsty beer drinker into the street without a cloaking brown bag. You lose, 7-Eleven. Ashok rummages for several minutes, retrieving a brown sack better suited for bagging groceries. I stroll out the door, eyeballing myself against that convenience-store trick for identifying thieves: the door-mounted ruler. Like always, I came up short, not unlike 7-Eleven.

I understand longing for a taste of home. I often salivate at the memory of greasy El Greco tacos, Dayton, Ohio's Greek-Mexican pride. But a 7-Eleven Slurpee is not an idiosyncratic yearning such as, say, New Mexico's green chiles or the Pacific Northwest's Rainier beer. Seven-Eleven reminds transplanted city dwellers of a life forsaken and better forgotten: aimlessly cruising cookie-cutter subdivisions, drinking a too-big-for-common-sense drink and dreaming that there's more to life than a chemically concocted frozen treat.

Bigger may be better, goes the American mantra, but better than 7-Eleven already exists.