Candyfreak

by Steve Almond

  CANDYFREAK

  Also by Steve Almond

  My Life in Heavy Metal

  CANDYFREAK

  A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America

  STEVE ALMOND

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2004

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  708 Broadway

  New York, New York 10003

  © 2004 by Steve Almond. All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by

  Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by Rebecca Giménez.

  Portions of this book have appeared in slightly

  different form in the Boston Phoenix.

  “Chocolate Jesus,” words and music by Tom Waits and

  Kathleen Brennan, copyright © 1999 by Jalma Music (ASCAP).

  All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Almond, Steve.

  Candyfreak : a journey through the chocolate underbelly of America /

  by Steve Almond.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-56512-421-9 1.

  Candy industry—United States. 2. Candy. 3. Chocolate.

  4. Almond, Steve. I. Title.

  HD9330.C653U513 2004

  338.4′7664153′0973—dc22 2003070801

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Edition

  TO DON RICCI ALMOND,

  a freak of unparalleled wisdom and

  sweetness. I love you, Pop.

  See, only a chocolate Jesus

  Will satisfy my soul.

  TOM WAITS

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  Some Things You Should Know about the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Author Will Now Rationalize

  Chocolate = Enabler

  In Which an Unhealthy Pattern of Dependence Is Established

  An Ill-Advised Discussion of Freak Economics

  Night of the Living Freak

  Mistakes Were Made

  CHAPTER TWO

  Caravelle: An Elegy

  I Manny

  Feeding the Beast

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Top-Secret Chocolate Situation

  The Politics of the Rack

  The Last Man in America with Black Jack Gum

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Capo Di Tutti Freak

  The Love Song of Ray Luthar Broekel

  Welcome to the Boom

  CHAPTER FIVE

  There Are Men upon This Earth Who Tread Like Gods

  Feuilletine, Revealed

  Freak Fetish

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Official Dark Horse Freak of Philadelphia

  Wee Willie and the Pop-a-Licks Rage

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Southern-Fried Freak

  Chocolate Haiku

  Freak Retentive

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In the Belly of the Freak

  The Unstoppable Freak Energy of Mr. Marty Palmer

  Southbound with the Hammers Down

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Candy Bar on Your Chin

  The Marshmallow Parallax

  A Depressing but Necessary Digression

  CHAPTER TEN

  Boise: Gateway to … Boise

  Ladies and Gentlemen, the Idaho Spud

  Huckleberry, Hounded

  American Lunch

  How Will the Spud Survive?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Past Is Just Ahead

  Remember This Name: Banana-Zaba

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A Second Depressing but Necessary Digression

  A Little Hidden Bomb in My Idaho Spud

  A Few Final Relevant Facts

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FREAK APPENDIX

  CANDYFREAK

  PROLOGUE

  SOME THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1. The author has eaten a piece of candy every single day of his entire life.

  I want you to look at this sentence and think about it briefly and, if you’re so inclined, perhaps say a little prayer on behalf of my molars. This would not be unwarranted, and for supporting evidence I refer you to Elizabeth Gulevich, a highly competent doctor of dental surgery who spent most of the early seventies numbing my jaw. I doubt Dr. Gulevich is the sort to have established a hall of fame in her waiting room (she was more the Ansel Adams type) but I would like to believe that my run of seven cavities during the infamous campaign of 1973 stands as some kind of record.

  Not a single day did I fail to consume, not one, not during those miserable family camping trips to Desolation Wilderness during which I kept nervous vigil over the trail mix for its meager ration of M&M’s; nor at Camp Tawonga, where I learned to savor the sweet gnash of hickeys and sun-ripened Red Vines; nor on those days when I was cut off from outside supply lines, bereft of funds, during which I thieved chocolate chips from the baking shelf and pressed same into a spoonful of Jif peanut butter; nor even in the aftermath of the removal of all four of my impacted wisdom teeth by a gentleman whose name was, I believe, Dr. Robago (Italian: butcher), after which I was on liquid food for five days and therefore partook of shakes from the Peninsula Creamery, made with mint chip ice cream.

  Also, was I the only child in America who regarded Baker’s Chocolate as the cruelest food product ever invented? Was I the only one who—despite repeated warnings from the Mother Unit, despite the dark knowledge that the Mother Unit would not knowingly place a pound of chocolate within my reach, that this was simply too easy, despite even my own clear memory of having tried this stunt before and wound up with a mouthful of bitter goo—reached into the back of the cupboard and removed the box and greedily slipped a square from its curiously stiff, white wrapper? Was I the only one who gazed upon the thick, angled square, so much like a Chunky, really, in abject lust? And who held the piece to my nose and breathed in the deep brown scent and then, despite all the evidence to the contrary, simply unable to will my disbelief, bit down?

  2. The author thinks about candy at least once an hour.

  More than that, actually, and not just the eating of a particular piece of candy, but a consideration of potential candies. For several years, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of introducing a new candy bar into the market: a crisp wafer held together with hazelnut paste, topped by crushed hazelnuts, and enrobed in dark chocolate. My friends have listened to me rather patiently and only a few have been impertinent enough to point out that no one in America actually likes hazelnuts, a kibbitz to which I generally respond, Yes, and they didn’t like penicillin at first either, did they?

  I think, occasionally, about the worst candy bar I ever ate, purchased on an overnight bus trip from Istanbul to Izmir back in 1986 and which had a picture of a donkey on the wrapper (this should have been a red flag) and a thick strip of cardboard to make it seem bulkier and which tasted like rancid carob and had a consistency similar to the sandy stuff Dr. Gulevich used to blast between my teeth.

  More often, though, I think about the candy bars of my youth that no longer exist, the Skrunch Bar, the Starbar, Summit, Milk Shake, Powerhouse, and more recent bars which have been wrongly pulled from the shelves—Hershey’s sublime Cookies ’n Mint leaps to mind—and I say kaddish for all of them.

  And when I say I think about these bars I am not referring to some momentary pulsing of the nostalgia buds. I am talking about detailed considerations of how they looked and tasted, the whipped splendor of the Choco-Lite, whose tiny air
pockets provided such a piquant crunch (the oral analogue to stomping on bubble wrap), the unprecedented marriage of peanuts and wafers in the Bar None, the surprising bulk of the Reggie!, little more than a giant peanut turtle, but round—a bar that dared to be round! Or, at the other extreme, the Marathon Bar, which stormed the racks in 1974, enjoyed a meteoric rise, died young, and left a beautiful corpse. The Marathon: a rope of caramel covered in chocolate, not even a solid piece that is, half air holes, an obvious rip-off to anyone who has mastered the basic Piagetian stages, but we couldn’t resist the gimmick. And then, as if we weren’t bamboozled enough, there was the sleek red package, which included a ruler on the back and thereby affirmed the First Rule of Male Adolescence: If you give a teenage boy a candy bar with a ruler on the back of the package, he will measure his dick.

  Oh where are you now, you brave stupid bars of yore? Where Oompahs, those delectable doomed pods of chocolate and peanut butter? Where the molar-ripping Bit-O-Choc? And where Caravelle, a bar so dear to my heart that I remain, two decades after its extinction, in an active state of mourning?

  Without necessarily intending to, I keep abreast of candy. I can tell you, for instance, that Hershey’s introduced in the fall of 2002 a Kit Kat bar with dark chocolate. I spent two weeks searching for this bar, because I had tasted a similar bar fifteen years earlier when I lived in Jerusalem and, back then, the taste had made me dance in happy little nondenominational circles, flapping my arms. Why two weeks? Because giant candy companies like Hershey’s rarely devote an entire production line to a new product without market testing, which means producing a limited edition, which means people like me (that is, candyfreaks) have to stop in every single Mobil station in the greater Boston area and ask the staff if they have Kit Kat Darks, because that is where my friend Alec told me he found his.

  Well.

  In the end, Alec—with whom I play squash, though, as a tandem, we somewhat belittle the definition of the sport—brought me a bar, purchased from the Inman Pharmacy, and I’m happy to report that it is absolutely mindblowing. The dark chocolate coating lends the fine angles of the bar a dignified sheen and exudes a puddinglike creaminess, with coffee overtones. This more intense flavor provides a counterpoint to the slightly cloying wafer and filling. By the time you read this, Kit Kat Darks will very likely have been discontinued, because they failed to make a gazillion dollars, which is a sad thing for you, I promise, though not so much for me because, in an abundance of caution, I purchased fourteen boxes (36 bars per) soon after my first taste.

  I can also tell you that Nestlé has introduced a Wonka Bar, which features crumbled bits of graham cracker in milk chocolate, and which to date I have only been able to find in my local movie theater. Last spring, Nestlé introduced a bar called the Mocha Crunch, which I spotted in a vending machine at Boston College, of all places, and I nearly wept with joy right there in the basement of the building where I teach college students how to write sentences far more coherent than this one, because I allowed myself to dream that the woefully neglected coffee flavor might finally be wending its way into the candy bar mainstream. I envisioned rich milk chocolate infused with the smoky tang of French roast. But the bar wasn’t even made of chocolate. It was some kind of white chocolate compound that looked, and tasted, like vinyl.

  3. The author has between three and seven pounds of candy in his house at all times.

  Perhaps you think I am exaggerating for effect.

  I am not exaggerating for effect.

  Here is a catalog of all the candy in my apartment as of right now, 3:21 P.M., July 6, 2003:

  –

  2 pounds miniature Clark Bars

  –

  1.5 pounds dark chocolate–covered mint patties

  –

  24 bite-size peanut butter cups

  –

  1 pound Tootsie Roll Midgets

  –

  4 ounces of Altoids-like cinnamon disks

  –

  6 ounces cherry-flavored jellies (think budget Jujyfruits)

  – A single gold-foiled milk chocolate ball with mysterious butter truffle–type filling

  – 2 squares of Valrona semisweet chocolate (on my bedside table)

  –

  3 pieces Fleer bubblegum

  I am not counting the fourteen boxes of Kit Kat Limited Edition Dark, which I have stored in an undisclosed warehouse location, nor whatever candy I might have stashed,squirrel-like, in obscure drawers.

  My main supplier is the Candy Shoppe, a seconds outlet located on the ground floor of the Haviland Chocolate factory in Cambridge. The Shoppe is run by an elderly Chinese woman whom I’ve been wooing ardently for the past two years. We’ve gotten to the point where she’s willing to cut open the box of mint patties I bring to the counter to make sure the batch I’m buying has the soft kind of filling I favor. She gives me freebies and glances at me occasionally in a squinting manner that combines reluctant affection with a deep, abiding pity.

  I am not blind to the hypocrisy of my conduct, nor to the slightly pathetic aspects of my freakdom. I am, after all, in my mid-thirties, suffering from severe balding anxiety and lowerback pain. I am not exactly the target demographic. What’s more, my political orientation is somewhere to the left of Christ, such that I find most of American culture greedy and heedless, most especially our blithe and relentless pigging of the world’s resources. I have a hard time defending the production of candy, given that it is basically crack for children and makes them dependent in unwholesome ways, and given that much of our citizenry is bordering on obesity (just about what we deserve), and given that most of the folks who grow our sugar and cocoa are part of an indentured Third World workforce who earn enough, per annum, to buy maybe a Snickers bar and given that the giants of the candy industry are, even as I write this, doing everything in their considerable power to establish freak hegemony over what they call “developing markets,” meaning hooking the children of Moscow and Beijing and Nairobi on their dastardly confections.

  So, the question: Given all this moral knowledge, how can I lead the life of an unbridled candyfreak?

  1

  THE AUTHOR WILL NOW RATIONALIZE

  The answer is that we don’t choose our freaks, they choose us.

  I don’t mean this as some kind of hippy dippy aphorism about the power of fate. We may not understand why we freak on a particular food or band or sports team. We may have no conscious control over our allegiances. But they arise from our most sacred fears and desires and, as such, they represent the truest expression of our selves.

  In my case, I should start with my father, as all sons must, particularly those, like me, who grew up in a state of semithwarted worship.

  Richard Almond: eldest son to the sensationally famous political scientist, Gabriel Almond, husband to the lovely and formidable Mother Unit (Barbara), father to three sons, esteemed psychiatrist, author, singer, handsome, brilliant, yes, check, check, check, expert maker of candles and jam, weekend gardener, by all measures (other than his own) a stark, raving success. This was my dad on paper. In real life, he was much harder to figure out, because he didn’t express his feelings very much, because he had come from a family in which emotional candor was frowned upon. So I took my clues where I could find them. And the most striking one I found was that he had an uncharacteristic weakness for sweets, that he was, in his own still-waters-run-deep kind of way, a candyfreak.

  I loved that I would find my dad, on certain Saturday afternoons, during the single hour each week that his presence wasn’t required elsewhere, making fudge in the scary black cast-iron skillet kept under the stove. I loved how he used a toothpick to test the consistency of the fudge and then gave the toothpick to me. I loved the fudge itself—dense, sugary, with a magical capacity to dissolve on the tongue.

  Following his lead, I even made a couple of efforts to cook up my own candy. I would cite the Cherry Lollipop Debacle of 1976 as the most memorable, in that I came quite close to creating act
ual lollipops, if you somewhat broaden your conception of lollipops to include little red globs of corn syrup that stick to the freezer compartment in such a manner as to cause the Mother Unit to weep.

  I loved that my dad was himself obsessed with marzipan (though I did not love marzipan). I loved his halvah habit (though I did not love halvah). I loved that he bought chocolatecovered graham crackers when he went shopping, and I do not mean the tragic Keebler variety, which are coated in a waxy, synthetic-chocolate coating that exudes a soapy aftertaste. I mean the original, old-school brand, covered in dark chocolate and filled not with an actual graham cracker, but with a lighter, crispier biscuit distinguished by its wheaty musk. I loved that my father would, after certain meals—say, those meals in which none of his sons threatened to kill another—give me a couple of bucks and send me to the Old Barrel to buy everyone a candy bar. What a sense of economic responsibility! Of filial devotion! I loved that my father chose Junior Mints and I loved how he ate them, slipping the box into his shirt pocket and fishing them out, one by one, with the crook of his index finger. I loved watching him eat these, patiently, with moist clicks of the tongue. I loved his mouth, the full, pillowy lips, the rakishly crooked teeth—the mouth of a closet sensualist.

  It is worth noting the one story about my father’s childhood that I remember most vividly, which is that his father used to send him out on Sunday mornings with six cents to get the New York Times, and that, on certain days, if he were feeling sufficient bravado, he would lose a penny down the sewer and buy a nickel pack of Necco wafers instead. This tale astounded me. Not only did it reveal my father as capable of subterfuge, but it suggested candy as his instrument of empowerment. (In later years, as shall be revealed, I myself became a prodigious shoplifter, though I tend to doubt that the legal authorities would deem the above facts exculpatory.)