Candyfreak

by Steve Almond

  The bottom line here is that candy was, for my father and then for me, one of the few permissible forms of self-love in a household that specialized in self-loathing. It would not be overstating the case to suggest that we both used candy as a kind of antidepressant.

  There were other factors in play:

  Oral Fixation—It is certainly possible that there is a person out there more orally fixated than me. I would not, however, want to meet him or her. We begin with thumbsucking. Oh yes. Devout thumbsucker, years zero to ten. I don’t remember how I was weaned from this habit, though it was probably around the time my older brother, Dave, asked me if I wanted to feel something “really cool,” then told me to put my hands behind my back and rubbed my thumbs with what felt like an oily towelette, but was, in fact, a hot chili plucked from the ristra hanging in our kitchen, which I discovered immediately upon sticking my thumb in my mouth. I was rendered speechless for the next four hours.

  So I kicked the thumb, but took up lollipops, gum, Lick-A-Stix, hard candies, and Fruit Rolls, which I used to wrap around my fingers and suck until my knuckles turned pruney. I still bite my nails to the quick. I’ve chewed through a forest of toothpicks. I’ve even tried to take up smoking. I frequently feel the desire to bite attractive women, not just in moments of amour, but in elevators, restaurants, subways.

  I don’t think of this as particularly strange. Babies, after all, learn to interact with the world through their mouths. For a good year or so—before their parents start hollering at them not to put things in their mouths—all they do is put things in their mouths. Perhaps my folks failed to yell this at me enough, because I still take on the world mouth-first, and I think about the experience of the world in my mouth all the time. (I am certain, by the way, that there is some really cool German word for this idea of the world in my mouth, something along the lines of zietschaungundermoutton, and if this were the sort of book that required actual research, I would consult my father, who speaks German.) What I mean by this is that I imagine what it would be like to lick or chew or suck a great deal of stuff. Examples would include the skin of a killer whale, any kind of bright acrylic paint, and Cameron Diaz’s eyeballs.

  I practice a good deal of mouthplay.

  If for instance, I happened to be eating a Jolly Rancher Cherry Stick, which I happened to be doing for much of my youth, I would gradually shape the candy into a quasi retainer. This was done by warming the piece until malleable, then pressing it up into my palate with my tongue. At a certain point, this habit morphed into an ardent belief that I could use candy to straighten my teeth, which were (and are) crooked.

  This was not such a crazy idea. Braces, after all, operated on the basic principle that, if pushed hard enough, teeth would move. So I spent most of fifth and sixth grades with a variety of hard candies lodged between my upper teeth. Charm’s Blow Pops were most effective for this purpose, because they had a stick and could thus be removed voluntarily.

  The Whole Name Thing—You will have noticed by this time, that I have a distinctly candyfreakish name. This is not my fault. All credit or blame should be directed to my paternal great-grandfather, the Rabbi David Pruzhinski (blessed be his memory), who came from the region of Pruzhini to London around 1885 and changed his name to Almond. Why Almond? The official explanation is steeped in academic ambition. David took secular classes during the day then raced off to attend rabbinical classes at night. The professors at his college posted grades and assignments in alphabetical order. So he needed a new name that began with a letter at the beginning of the alphabet. No one knows why he settled on Almond over, say, Adams. There has been speculation that he was the victim of a prank. Or that he chose Almond because the almond tree is frequently mentioned in the Old Testament. Whatever the reason, I was saddled with this strange name, which meant that I was constantly, constantly, being serenaded with the sometimes you feel like a nut Almond Joy/Mounds jingle, which I would have liked to quote in full, except that Hershey’s legal staff denied me permission. I can certainly understand why. God only knows what ruin might befall Hershey’s if this jingle—which hasn’t been used in two decades—were suddenly brazenly resurrected by a young Jewish candyfreak. One shudders to consider the fallout for the entire fragile candy-jingletrademark ecosystem. The company was, however, thoughtful enough to include in its letter of refusal a coupon for a dollar off any Hershey’s product—Twizzlers included!—which certainly went a long way toward restoring my faith in corporate America.

  I should note that the success of this particular jingle was an undying source of fascination to me and especially irksome because I didn’t even like almonds as a kid and absolutely loathed coconut, an enmity which will be discussed further on. I’m not suggesting that my identity was determined by something as random as my last name, just as I wouldn’t suggest that those with the last name Miller will grow up with a predilection for cheap beer. But there is no doubt that having a name associated with candy was a contributing factor. So was the date of my birth, October 27, a mere four days before the Freak National Holiday. And one other fact that I have come to regard as eerie: for virtually my entire childhood our family lived on a street called Wilkie Way.

  Freak Physiology—I have been endowed with one of those disgusting metabolisms that allow me to eat at will. To physiologists, I am a classic ectomorph, though my ex-girlfriends have tended to gravitate toward the term scrawny. The downside of this metabolic arrangement is that I am a slave to my blood sugar. If I don’t eat for too long, I start thinking about murdering people, and I am inexorably drawn toward fats and carbs. I hate most vegetables, particularly what I call the evil brain trio—broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts—which tastes, to me, like flatulence that has been allowed to blossom. Left to my own devices, my diet would consist of dark chocolate and baguettes, with perhaps a grilled pork rib thrown in for variety. I realize that I am going to hell.

  Every now and again, I’ll run into someone who claims not to like chocolate or other sweets, and while we live in a country where everyone has the right to eat what they want, I want to say for the record that I don’t trust these people, that I think something is wrong with them, and that they’re probably—this must be said—total duds in bed.

  CHOCOLATE = ENABLER

  The main thing, though, is that I formed this emotional bond to candy. My parents were too busy, my older brother wanted me dead, my twin brother set off into the world without me. This was how I saw things. I was a needy kid, and terribly lonely, and candy kept me company. I wasn’t fat, but I understood the appeals of gluttony, how a certain frantic gratification might numb the sting of sorrow. And if it seems, at times, that I am playing off my obsession with candy as something frivolous/heartwarming, this is, like most of our routines, just a way of obscuring its darker associations.

  I can remember staggering down the streets of Baden-Baden, Germany, at dawn, close to hysterical with an unnamed sadness. This was the summer between my sophomore and junior years in college. I was traveling in Europe because I assumed this was what one did at age 20 in order to acquire that mysterious attribute known as worldliness. Earlier in the day, I’d met some fellow travelers at a hostel and we’d smoked some hash and there was some girl involved, a blond Australian who I hoped might be willing to kiss me a little. But I did something uncool, let my desperation show, and they ditched me outside a fancy casino. I wandered back to the hostel, but it was closed for the night and when I tried to sneak in, a German fellow came and shouted at me in a manner that made me think of Hitler. So I spent the night walking from one end of town to the other. When I think about this episode, what returns to me most vividly is the elegant vending machine outside that casino, which sold Lindt chocolate bars for a single deutsche mark. And how, in the morning, I found an outdoor café and bought a roll which I cut in half and buttered to make a chocolate sandwich.

  Years later, I moved to Poland to live with a woman. But we soon fell out of love and began to argue. In th
e evenings, after our fights, flushed and seething and scared to death, I would wander the narrow avenues of her town and stop at one of the kiosks to buy a candy bar, the name of which I don’t remember, only that it was a sweet vanilla wafer covered in a dark, bitter chocolate. On the day I returned home to America, I found a cache of these bars at the bottom of my suitcase, left there by my lover, that I might carry with me, at least a little longer, the taste of our doomed enterprise.

  IN WHICH AN UNHEALTHY PATTERN OF DEPENDENCE IS ESTABLISHED

  We need to talk a little about the Initial Candy Supplier (ICS). Everyone has an ICS and in most cases people can recall not just the name but the smell of the place, the precise configuration of the racks, the quality of light across those racks. In the psychic galaxy of the child, the ICS is the sun.

  My ICS was the aforementioned Old Barrel, a neighborhood landmark built around a tremendous, and presumably old, wine barrel, at least 20 feet tall. It was not until much later (age 30, actually) that the connection between this architectural flourish and the store’s identity dawned on me. This is because I never thought of the Old Barrel as a liquor store. It was a candy store. I was fascinated by the barrel, though. For many years, I believed it was actually full of wine and I spent hours speculating as to what would happen if someone chopped through the weather-faded wood. Would the surrounding land be flooded with cheap cabernet? Would people drown? And furthermore, how did one remove wine from such a barrel? Was there some hidden spigot? As I have mentioned, I was a lonely child.

  I knew all the guys who worked at the Old Barrel, though not by name. There was Bald Guy and Tremor Guy and Bad Breath Guy. Mustache Guy was the most intriguing. He had this beautiful lacquered seventies pompadour and muttonchops and a blond mustache I would describe as pornoriffic. I remember him most distinctly, I think, because he was the one who was least attentive and therefore, the easiest to shoplift off. And I can remember, at seven or eight, my father cornering me and demanding to know where I got the Grape Stick I was innocently shaping into a retainer. He marched me all the way back to the Old Barrel (I was bawling) and made me fess up to Mustache Guy and remunerate him a dime.

  The lone exception to the no-name rule was Jimmy Zucanti, who was maybe five years ahead of me in school and who once gave me a minor concussion during a game of tackle the pill and who, at a certain point, showed up behind the counter. This was a stupefying development: the equivalent of having an acquaintance anointed pope.

  The Old Barrel sold all the basics, your major candy bars, your LifeSavers and gums, your tencent quick-and-dirties (Hot Tamales, Jawbreakers, Lemonheads, Red Hots, Mike and Ike). But at a certain point, I needed to broaden my horizons.

  Patterson’s Drugs, on El Camino, stocked a candy known as Kits, tiny individually wrapped taffies that came four to a pack. Kits were smaller than Now and Laters and sweeter, and to my way of thinking, more distinguished. The packages were these perfect little rectangles, pink for strawberry, yellow for banana, brown for chocolate. I picked up 20 packs for a dollar and spent the balance of the afternoon playing with them on my bed.

  This is generally what I did with candy: I played with it on my bed. I counted it. I organized it by color. I ran my fingers through it. I sat there like a pint-sized Midas and gloried in my wealth. Occasionally, I staged a kind of candy combat. I wasn’t mindless about candy. I was ritualized.

  At about age ten, during a late summer visit to Sears to buy school clothes, I became aware of the concept of candy by the pound. This was revolutionary. Here were entire stalls of candy, naked as the day they were born, piled up two feet high and God knows how deep, glittering behind glass windows. You might have thought I was staring at tropical fish in an aquarium. Or you might have been the poor clerk forced to sit inside the Sears candy stand on one of the many ensuing Saturdays, which meant you faced an odd decision: whether or not to call security on the little, bubble-eyed goon circling your station, which was me.

  What it was—beauty. The sheer, entropic plenitude of gumdrops, jelly beans, orange slices. I might buy any of these, merely for the joy of watching the clerk dig her shiny little silver scoop into the bin, pouring out my portion first in a great plinking rush, then one by one (plunk, plunk) as the green numbers on the electronic scale blinked up. Mostly it was saltwater taffy, which was relatively light and therefore cheap and came in nine color-coded flavors, all of which, somewhat pathetically, I recall in precise detail: the pink-and-red swirled cinnamons, green-ribboned spearmints, the chocolate drops with blurry dabs of cherry in the center.

  At Sears, candy prices were governed by the law of supply and demand, especially after the seasonal candy rush. So, for example, the Christmas Mix reached a low point of 25 cents per pound if you waited until the second week of January. (Dr. Gulevich: Are you sure he hasn’t been eating candy? The Mother Unit: I don’t see how. He only gets 50 cents allowance, and we don’t let the boys eat sweet cereal.)

  At a certain point, of course, kids are supposed to outgrow candy. They move on to other freaks. My older brother, for instance, graduated from LEGOs to Estes rockets to beekeeping. Not me. By the early teenage years, I was making sojourns to the distant Mayfield Mall for a particular piece found only in the Kandy Karousel on level three. This was the mint parfait, two square slabs of bittersweet chocolate around a pale green center. Think a jumbo-size Andes mint, though with a sharper bite to the chocolate and none of that chalky aftertaste that plagues the Andes oeuvre. The parfait was a highbrow piece, and it amazes me a little to realize that I would ride my bike four miles each way and spend up to three dollars for a small white sack of them.

  The discovery of marijuana more or less sealed my freak. I was never a burnout in the classic sense, meaning that I never grew my hair long and listened to Blue Öyster Cult and cut classes to hang out by the big oak tree next to the amphitheater. I was too terrified of academic failure to offer that sort of commitment. I tended to steal pot from my older brother and to smoke it alone, because smoking was something he did, something vaguely illicit, and though the quality of the weed was so poor that it would probably cause Snoop Dogg to go into anaphylactic shock, it did allow me to feel a gauzy sense of appreciation for the blessings in my life, chief amongst them candy. If I had been the kind of kid who kept a diary, the entries from the years twelve to say, sixteen, would have read: Got high, ate candy.

  I remember, in this phase, eating a lot of Tangy Taffy. Where -fore Tangy Taffy? Because it was cheap. You could buy two slabs for 50 cents. They were tart enough to excite the salivary glands, a crucial factor in the battle against cottonmouth. Also, when buying a batch of candy—and by this time I was buying in batches—I liked to create a value gradient, such that I could eat the cheap stuff first and save the higher quality chocolate items for last. As for the actual taste of Tangy Taffy … imagine, if you will, a fruit-flavored caulk. Add some citric acid. Add some coloring. You’re getting close.

  As should be evident, candy was my chief extracurricular activity. This is not to suggest that I didn’t do my share of candy worship in school. For a while there, before the Mother Unit got wise, I was given a buck fifty for lunch every day. The assumption was that I would buy, oh, I don’t know, cauliflower sprigs or something. What I bought was Granny Goose Nacho Cheese Chips, chocolate milk, and the fascinating new Twix bar, which I consumed by scraping the chocolate-andcaramel top layer off with my teeth, then sucking the remaining wafer-and-chocolate slab until it became a sugary mush.

  Despite this diet, I eventually hit puberty and even underwent a do-at-home bar mitzvah (at age fourteen), which was not held in an actual hot tub, though I have from time to time told people this. For those of you not familiar with the mystical ways of the suburban Jew, the bar mitzvah is the ceremony whereby a boy delivers an achingly dull speech, mangles a few prayers in Hebrew, and thereby becomes a man. And just how did I commemorate this sacred passage into adulthood?

  Got high, ate candy.

  AN ILL-ADVISE
D DISCUSSION OF FREAK ECONOMICS

  In the ideal world, moms and dads would have enough time and energy to fill their children with love, and brothers would take care of one another, and there would be lots of extended family members around to pick up the slack. But as it is, the developed world has become a cold, atomized place in which people are cut off from their internal lives and therefore subject to the most basic form of self-esteem extortion—materialism—which means that they have agreed to be judged by what they eat and wear and drive, by their fitness as capitalists, as opposed to, say, the content of their characters.

  And this goes for children as well, who are, if anything, more apt to project their emotional life onto objects rather than people. Any parent whose child has a favorite blankie or sippy cup will back me up on this. What the folks in the boardrooms and on Madison Avenue sussed out a couple of decades back is this: manipulation of family dynamics = big bucks. Thus, the guilty dad will buy off his kid. And the deprived child will learn to seek love in material form.

  Just as important, the folks whose job it is to move product (which is virtually all of us) have come to recognize that children are ideal consumers: impatient and dogged and ferociously brand loyal. Kids are also exquisitely attuned to the chaotic emotional rhythms of supply and demand. For what, in the end, was the mania surrounding baseball cards or Cabbage Patch Kids, if not a stock market in miniature? Or, better yet, Pokemon cards? If you ever spoke to a child in the thrall of Pokemon, you were basically talking to a day trader in vitro. Because these cards, in fact, had no utilitarian value. Their value was, as the wonks would put it, market determined. That market, while initiated by adults, was sustained entirely by kids.

  Candy is the Dow Jones of the kid economy. And anyone who grew up during the sweaty seventies (as I did) can tell you about the various boom and bust cycles. I would cite the Bubble Yum craze of 1975 as paramount. Prior to this, your bubble gum genre had been ruled by either Bazooka (a solidtasting, if somewhat grainy nostalgia product sold as piece candy) or Rain-Blo (loudly colored gum balls that came in clear plastic wrappers). Bubble Yum marked an innovation of both form and content. The manufacturers intuited that one of the limiting factors for the bubble gum market was that the product seemed too immature. So they created a package that resembled a candy bar, with five individually wrapped cubes. The gum itself was smooth, almost creamy, and loaded with sugar.