Monster Energy Ultra Fiesta

Concord Food and Liquor is staffed by a shockingly gentle woman with an English accent. She calls me “love.” I’ve come to her shop looking for three items: sparkling water, a snack, and some kind of pick me up. This third need is the loudest of the three. Spurred by heavy eyelids, I cruise the fridges by the back and land on a familiar class of caffeine: Monster Energy.

Whoever stocked this store took a look at the Monster catalog, asked themselves,”Which of these seem palatable?” and exclusively stocked the other options. Everything on the shelf is low carb. Everything about these cans is against nature. The color, the names, the nutrition facts, all feel like harbingers of a post-food dystopia somewhere in the near future. But it’s this, soda, or “Bang!” energy. There is no way out. Caught between my consumer preferences, my need to get back on the road, and my rapidly fading fighting spirit, I make my choice: Monster Ultra Fiesta.

I used to love Monster. Back in college, it got me through every final exam. I reserved it almost exclusively for these study binges, conditioning my brain to associate its forced alertness with equation retention. Orange Monster was my poison of choice. At the time it had real fruit juice to sweeten it, no corn syrup to be seen. It felt pure, powerful. Like the kind of performance enhancer a personal trainer would give you after a hard work out, saying, “Take this and you’ll blow through that plateau. Don’t worry, it’s natural.”

Then Coca-Cola acquired the Monster brand. They promptly removed the fruit juice, added corn syrup, and began multiplying flavor options. The world’s top flavor scientists, laboring under the whip and chain of marketing executives, transmuted that single catch-all ingredient, “natural flavors,” into a fleet of distinct, candy-colored cans. I feel no nostalgia, no familiarity with these novelty drinks. They seduce and terrify. They do not even pretend to be food. They are from a place beyond.

I pay the nice British lady, take my can back to the U-Haul, and pop the tab. 

I do a double take. My eyes alternately pop and squint. From just one sip, I am impossibly awake.

You know that one “friend” you have, the one that always shows up super late to the party and tries to drag you along on some all-night bender? The one you’ve only ever seen jittery and twitching like he’s just done a rail of Colombian pure? Imagine twenty of that guy grabbing some blue raspberry flavoring, crawling down your throat, and throwing a party in your stomach for a few hours. That’s Monster Ultra Fiesta. 

This kind of flavor feels like it should be illegal. The saturation, the intensity, every element of the drinking experience is entirely off the map of what I consider food. This is the sort of flavor that earns its inevitable compound name: a flavor blasting berry burst explosion, maybe, or a tropical citrus splash dynamite. These imagined names are not hyperbole. I cannot imagine calling this stuff anything other than a vague fruit conjoined with a violent noun. It is somehow every blue flavor experience and none of them at once. I’m definitely ingesting it, but this hardly resembles the act of drinking I once knew. My confusion is heightened as I read the nutrition facts: zero calories. All this sweetness carried solely by a couple grams of erythritol. Who knows what nerves, both in and outside the tongue, this stuff is lighting up.

Hot on the heels of that initial flavor burst is the energy kick. It fills my head. I cannot separate it from the taste and texture of the liquid; my entire sensory apparatus has been hijacked and cranked up. I have been launched into a synthetic pocket dimension, a place beyond good and evil, governed solely by unknowable chemicals. My alien high is erected and maintained on the back of L-carnitine, caffeine, taurine, and a flurry of B6 and B12 compounds. The cocktail has reached into my bloodstream to animate my nerves and muscles. I am just along for the ride. 

On Monster Ultra Fiesta, you will not sleep. Sleep would require a level of psychological safety that is no longer available. That first draft nudges you over a slope too steep to climb, each sip compelling the next, until you slide into an unnatural wakefulness past desirability, past pragmatism, rapidly approaching a complete immolation of your sense of self.

Four hours later, still high, I am still wondering the cost. With every ounce I drank, I felt a debt accumulating on an invisible ledger. Even with a mostly-empty can miles behind me, I worry: what did I sign away to this Faustian beverage? Will I sleep tonight? Will I ever sleep again? 

Such questions must wait. For now, I’m stuck in the fiesta. My heart pumps like a banda tuba, throbbing with manufactured heat and borrowed enthusiasm. There is no exit. My mouth is dry. I can feel the creases on my face. My eyes are still red, but oh, can they see. They see too much. Everywhere, in every color, line, and movement, I see it still: the Ultra Fiesta is awake. The Ultra fiesta is inside me. The Ultra Fiesta will come for us all.