I like orange soda. I like grape, too.

It's something an 8-year-old boy would like, and it embarrasses me sometimes. At the newspaper where I work, the newsroom is full of guys drinking energy drinks ad sports drinks and coconut water and pomegranate nectar. Me, I got a 12-ounce glass bottle of Fanta Grape on my desk.

I like the Mexican Fanta, too. The Mexican one is sweeter and grapier. Apparently, sweet soda is like cocaine now. The cartel has to mule it in from below the border. Donald Trump's wall is probably going to put a stop to that and I'll end up drinking that flavored seltzer, the kind that says "grape" on the bottle but has only a suggestion of grape flavor. The grape-flavored seltzer is like the cocaine they sell in suburban high schools compared with the cocaine they sell in bad neighborhoods.

It's likewise in the stores, too. Forget the big "convenience" stores, where they've got a wall full of Guava Energy Triple X Energy Fizz, but you can't get a bottle of orange soda.

You wanna get the real grape and orange soda? If you do, you gotta go to a corner store in a crappy neighborhood. In those stores, the owner's not from America, they sell single cigarettes from under the counter and you can buy Fourth of July fireworks, illegally, in February.

Here's a tip: If the store has an "EBT Welcome" sign in the window and they sell those cheap cigarettes that burn real fast, they'll have real orange soda, in a glass bottle.

If the store has a counter designed to be too high for robbers to jump over and sells toilet paper one roll at a time, they're gonna have grape soda.

In fact, the second kind of store will have grape cigars. They'll also have grape bubble gum, grape vodka, grape Popsicles and grape incense. There is apparently a great need among the urban poor to experience the wonders of artificial grape flavoring. It's not an ethnic thing, either. Grape-flavored anything is equally popular in poor black, poor white and poor Hispanic neighborhoods.

Orange and grape soda were socially acceptable when I was young. That's how I got started. Back then, people would give the stuff to kids. Parents today fear the "sugar rush." When I was a boy, if you got all cranked up on soda, your old man just told you to go outside and play. Sometimes, he'd throw you half a buck, and you'd go down to the corner and get another soda.

These days, parents with a degree in marketing and shaky non-union jobs are funneling acai berry juice into their kids, while I'm forced into an increasingly dangerous series of lousy neighborhoods, just to get a bottle of the sweet stuff from Mexico.

They used to sell grape soda in every working-class neighborhood. Of course, when was the last time you saw a working-class neighborhood?

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit wwwcreators.com. Dion latest book, "King of the World on $14 an Hour," is a collection of his best 2014 columns and is available for Nook and Kindle.