by Steve Almond
Russ had assumed his tone of avuncular jocularity, but there was something unmistakably sad in the air. I felt I had overstayed my welcome. This being the Midwest, however, Russ insisted on driving me to the airport, after he took care of a couple of things. I spent the next few minutes in the office next door, chatting with Mildred, who told me she used to live in Boston with her late husband. Her husband had worked for a manufacturer of prosthetic limbs and the company used to send him out to show folks how to operate their new arms and legs.
“Was he an amputee?” I said.
“Oh yes,” Mildred said. “Yes. I probably should have mentioned that. They paid all his expenses, motel and gas money and so forth. I would go along on weekends. We got to see a lot of the country that way.”
The ride to the airport was dispiriting. The view from I-35 was mostly shopping centers. There were a few open lots where bulldozers were clearing the ground, presumably for more shopping centers. Russ provided a glum play-by-play of the development. We passed by the Missouri River. A factory on the far bank was coughing a thick plume of smoke into the clouds. Just before we reached the airport, Russ admitted that he’d been contacted by another candy company about the possible sale of his business. These were just discussions, he said quietly. There was nothing in writing. I was stunned. Just a few minutes ago, he’d sounded so committed to passing the business down to Dave.
I sat in the Kansas City airport, eating lousy barbeque and thinking about the strangeness of my visit. Russ had initially presented himself as a man without worries, a scrapper who’d made it against the odds. But the longer he talked, the less convincing he’d sounded. There’d been a real rage in his denunciations of Wal-Mart and the other corporate bullies. I wondered to what extent this rage was really about the larger injustice he’d suffered: losing his daughter. Most forms of rage, after all, are only sloppy cloaks for grief. I should make clear: Russ hadn’t dwelled on her death. He’d focused on the factory he’d brought to life, the miraculous white of the marshmallow, the thick fragrance of hand-beaten chocolate. But tragedies of a certain magnitude bleed into everything.
As she got sicker, Russ told me, he’d turned his attentions toward her and her children, and away from the business. One afternoon she’d called him on the phone, told him she didn’t feel well, and he’d raced over to her house to look after the kids. “I just wasn’t focused on work,” he said. He blamed himself, in part, for the recent downturn in revenues. This was a ludicrous notion. But it’s the kind of thing survivors do all the time. They find a way to punish themselves for remaining alive.
I thought of how Russ himself had described his beloved Valomilks, which struck me, in the cold, carpeted glare of the Kansas City airport, as a suitable summation of the human condition: “They’re dangerous,” he said. “The filling gets all over the place. That’s just how they’re made.”
A DEPRESSING BUT NECESSARY DIGRESSION
I now must make my own disturbing confession, which is that I went to take a leak in the airport bathroom and, while somewhat absently fondling myself down there (something that every red-blooded American male does, though perhaps not quite as often as I do), I felt a lump, or what I imagined to be a lump, and became convinced, almost at once, that I had cancer and that I would die.
With the benefit of hindsight, along with a physical exam conducted by an actual doctor, I can happily diagnose this as a hysterical episode. But at the time, I was totally convinced. And thus, my feeling state—which was, as you have no doubt already observed, lurching from hyper to disconsolate—gave way to a sustained panic. I spent much of the next week gingerly palpating myself. Each time I felt the lump (which was every time, because the lump was, in fact, a necessary part of my male functioning, called the epididymis), dread would squirt through my chest cavity and my heart would start spazzing out. Then I would begin to get maudlin. I would consider my life and decide that it had been a terrible failure, a desperate plea for attention, a romantic wasteland, a creative mediocrity, and now it was over and what did I have to show for myself?
I realize that I am oversharing. I realize further that, should we ever meet in person, you might have justifiable reservations about shaking my hand. But the story of my trip would be incomplete without this disclosure, as it weighed so heavily upon me. And it’s important to know this, too: the only time I forgot entirely about my impending death was when I lost myself in candy.
10
BOISE: GATEWAY TO … BOISE
I had never visited Idaho before, though I had some conception of the place as large and cold and mostly barren, a western cousin of the Dakotas. I knew, also, that it had a funny shape, a long, slim handle that stretched all the way to Canada. That was about it.
My flight had come in from Denver, where, on a scintillating two-hour layover, I guiltily consumed a McDonald’s chicken sandwich, which tasted like cayenne pepper and industrial soap. By the time the pilot announced our initial descent into Boise, it was nearly eleven. I remember gazing down from my window seat. I expected to see the lights of the city laid out in neat yellow rows. There was nothing but a yawning black space cut into strips by the blue lights of the runways. The flight must have come in to Boise from the east. But all I could think was: Where’d they put the city?
As luck would have it, my visit coincided with a convention of the International Association of Arson Investigators. I felt a twinge of dread when I saw this announcement on the Holiday Inn marquee, because, as a twelve-year-old, out on the mean streets of south Palo Alto, I had nearly been arrested for arson. What had happened was this: my friend Brian Danforth and I had decided to explore a small, abandoned building along El Camino Real. This was totally normal twelve-yearold behavior, predicated on the belief that abandoned buildings contained piles of forgotten cash.
In this case, we did not find forgotten money. We found a little room in back with most of the walls busted out and lots of interesting trash on the ground, including an empty pack of Zig-Zags and part of a girlie magazine. It was the kind of place that twelve-year-old boys, in lieu of money, hope to find: covert and dilapidated, with the stink of sin all around. One or another of us lit a match, so as to see the girlie magazine in more detail, and the next thing we knew we were being ordered to freeze by a uniformed cop. I had never been spoken to by a cop.
There were two cops actually, beefy-armed and humorless, and they led us to their police cruiser and asked us to place our hands on the vehicle and spread our legs. The radios on their shoulders hummed and crackled and issued bursts of strangled words and numbers, which terrified us more than the cops themselves. (Were we going there?) The cop who found us patted me down and removed from my pocket a half-eaten Big Hunk. The bar still had my teeth marks. I found this a humiliating sight, especially in the context of a possible arrest scenario. I imagined having to check my belongings in prison. (Hey boys, looks like we got us a really hard case! Look what he did to this here Big Hunk!) The cop explained that he could place us under arrest, right then, for trespassing, as well as suspicion of arson, but that he was going to let us go if we promised to stay away from abandoned buildings. It must have occurred to him by then that we were not exactly towering criminal minds.
My point: I wasn’t much in the mood for grabbing a nightcap in the bar, which was filled with men in glowering mustaches who could be heard muttering terms such as solvent extraction and microtaggants. I went to my room instead and palpated myself about 25 times and contemplated the poignancy of my untimely death. And when I got tired of this, I turned on the TV and watched the midterm election results. The Republicans were stomping the Democrats. Poor Walter Mondale, recruited to replace the last actual liberal in the Senate, the late Paul Wellstone, was addressing his supporters in some lousy hotel ballroom. He looked like a man brought out of storage and reinflated to not-quite life-size. What an embarrassment it was. The Bush tax cut had sopped the rich and wiped out the federal surplus. The economy was in the crapper. Dubya was doin
g everything in his power to hand the planet to Exxon. And America couldn’t get enough of his abuse!
Two years earlier, I’d sat in front of another TV and watched him steal the presidency in broad daylight. Then a bunch of vicious airborne murderers had come along and scared the common sense out of everyone. In one morning, they’d managed to bestow upon this evangelical simpleton an air of presidential dignity. He saw his chance and bounced the rubble in Afghanistan and kept the bellows of war going (Iraq was next) and now the Democrats were too chickenhearted to oppose him. It was the poor who were going to pay, as they always do, and who gave a damn about them?
But then, who was I to bitch about all this? I hadn’t even voted! I’d just flounced off on my candyland adventure without even bothering to consider my civic duty, and so, in some sense, I deserved the damage that Dubya was no doubt going to inflict on our country’s already limited capacities for mercy, though, actually, none of this really mattered that much, because (lest we forget) I was dying. I snapped off the TV and listened to the muted rumble of the arson investigators in the bar across the breezeway and ate my way through a box of chocolatecovered pretzels and lay on my hotel bed in the dark with chocolate on my teeth, fuming like the good, useless liberal I am.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE IDAHO SPUD
So I woke up with a pretty severe electoral hangover. It called to mind the morning after the Reagan versus Mondale election of 1984. I was a freshman in college, appropriately bereaved, wandering down my dorm hall when I saw a large, bearish figure in shower sandals lumbering toward me. This was Seth Bergstein, the hall’s resident hockey player. “We kicked your ass,” Seth boomed. “Your guy got three points! Three lousy points!”
This was who led the country now. Seth Bergstein led the country.
My phone rang and Dave Wagers, the president of Idaho Candy Company, told me he was waiting in the parking lot out front. I went to the lobby and looked outside and saw a large white SUV with the license plate CANDMAN. Please, I said to myself, don’t let this guy be a Seth Bergstein.
He was not. Let me go on record as stating that Dave Wagers is the coolest president of a candy company on earth. I say this not solely because he spent a day showing me around his factory, but because he did so in a way that suggested an authentic fascination with his chosen vocation. Dave’s basic attitude was: I make candy. It’s pretty cool to make candy. Do you want some candy? I don’t fault guys like Russ Sifers or Marty Palmer for hamming it up a little. That’s part of their job. But it was refreshing to meet a guy who seemed, frankly, pretty clueless when it came to self-promotion.
There were other reasons to like Dave Wagers. At 36, he was the youngest president I had encountered. He dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. He looked a lot like Richie Brockleman, the eager, dorky PI who did his apprenticeship with Jim Rockford on the Rockford Files and whom I viewed as a role model through much of my adolescence. Dave had not heard of Richie Brockleman. “The one I get most of the time is Robert Kennedy,” he told me. This was true. Dave had the same blue eyes and a strong, slightly overcrowded jaw. The problem is that Robert Kennedy was so terribly serious. Dave was just way more chill than Robert Kennedy.
So we got in his SUV and cruised toward downtown. There were construction projects on both sides of the road. These were big cookie-cutter homes, the sort that eventually compose developments with names like Splendid Oaks and White River. Boise was growing like crazy. When Dave was a kid, the city had a population of 50,000, twice that in the outlying area. Those numbers had quadrupled. This was the fundamental paradox of recent American migration patterns: people kept seeking a life away from the big city, in towns like Boise, thus turning towns like Boise into … big cities.
Boise, however, was not a big city in the coastal sense of that word. Aside from the grand old statehouse and a few half -hearted skyscrapers, the downtown was low-slung and relaxed. It was nestled in a mountainous valley on the western fringe of the Boise National Forest, which covered most of the state. Recently, high-tech companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Micron had opened factories in town, but agriculture was still the dominant industry. The state produced nearly a third of the country’s potatoes.
Idaho Candy had been around since 1901, and in the same factory since 1909. “We’re probably the only manufacturer still downtown,” Dave said. We had pulled into a parking lot near the domed statehouse. He hopped out of his truck and made his way toward a loading dock and found a toehold in the cracked concrete and pulled himself onto the dock. I didn’t quite understand at first. Then it struck me: this was how the president of Idaho Candy entered his factory.
I thought: I can rally with this.
“Here’s where we keep the sugar,” Dave said, wending his way through sacks the size of small hatchbacks. “The second biggest sugar factory in America is fifteen miles away and they deliver, which is kind of nice. We take the sugar up on this hydraulic lift, then it gets blown up a tube and onto the roof.” I didn’t quite get how one could blow sugar up onto a roof, but I didn’t have time to ask Dave. He was eager to get up to the third floor, so he could check on what he called “the new machine,” a 20-year-old starch mogul he had purchased from the Henry Heide factory in New Jersey. The machine had been flown across the country and lowered through the roof of Dave’s factory a week earlier. The mogul was crucial to any number of his products, but chiefly to the company’s flagship bar, the Idaho Spud.
The third floor was a long, rectangular room lit by wide overhead skylights. Shafts of sun lit the maple floors and glinted off the steel machinery. It was like a shot out of Hitchcock—at once harsh and starkly beautiful. Dave kept getting offers to lease the space out as a loft, the most recent from a photographer who was awed by the quality of light in the room.
We arrived at a machine shaped like a deep pit barbeque, the whipper. Dave swung the lid open. The whipper was filled with an off-white liquid streaked in brown and speckled with air bubbles. “That’s our Spud,” Dave said, giving the word a hayseed inflection. Spud was basically a marshmallow filling composed of sugar, corn syrup, egg whites, and salt, and flavored with maple, vanilla, and dried cocoa (thus the brown streaks). Most marshmallows contain gelatin, to make them chewy. The Spud used a seaweed derivative called ager ager. At Dave’s urging, I inspected a bucket of ager ager. It emanated a distinct and not pleasing odor. On the ground beneath the bucket was a pool of congealed agar agar, slick and translucent, with a rubbery consistency like cartilage.
Dave could see that I was in a state of moderate disgust.
“It’s pretty wild stuff,” he said. “They use it for petri dishes, growing cultures in labs. At the end of the day, there’s always this weird crust in the whipper that we have to pull out. But what the agar agar does is gives the Spud a real resilience.” He walked over to the mogul and removed one of the cured fillings. “Give it a try,” Dave said. “Without the coating, you’ll really be able to taste the maple.”
I may have implied earlier that the Twin Bing was the strangest candy bar I saw on my sojourn. The Idaho Spud was far stranger. The filling was shaped like a Twinkie and surprisingly heavy. It had a sickly, grayish tint. I briefly considered telling Dave that I was allergic to products derived from seaweed. Or that I had a spastic colon. But the one thing you didn’t do, in the presence of the president of a candy company, was refuse to sample product. What you did—to borrow a charming phrase from my creative writing students—was sack it up. I took a bite.
I will not pretend that I loved the Spud. (What I loved was the idea of the Spud.) But I was pleasantly surprised. There was indeed a delicate maple undertone to the piece, as well as a hint of cocoa. Most striking was the texture.
“It’s a little like tofu,” I said. “It has that same density.”
“Right,” Dave said. “A tofu marshmallow. You know, in the twenties and thirties the Spud was actually billed as the healthful candy bar, because of the agar agar. It’s one of our most expensive ingredients.
We pay nine dollars a pound for our agar agar.”
Dave considered this fact gravely, before turning his attention to the mogul.
“What’s going on, Greg?” he said.
Greg was his candy maker, a burly gentleman who wore his hairnet under a gimme cap that was caked in cornstarch. The overall effect was not unlike an Arab headdress.
“Something’s wrong with the depositor,” Greg said.
He pressed a button on the mogul’s control panel and the great machine lurched into motion. An army of trays, each with 36 Spud molds, came trundling forward. The cured Spuds, rousted from their molds, thumped about in clouds of cornstarch. Greg had already pumped the Spud filling from the whipper into a large hopper suspended above the mogul. This liquid was fed into a series of nozzled valves, which were supposed to squirt the filling into the oncoming molds. They did so perfectly on the first set of molds. But with the second set, the valves squirted a half-second too early. The result of this premature, er, depositation was that only a portion of the filling made it into the mold. The rest spilled over the edge.
Dave and Greg peered at the depositor.
DAVE: Why would that be?
GREG: Timing chain?
DAVE: Doesn’t make any sense.
GREG: You messed with the timing chain yesterday, right?
DAVE: Yeah, but I didn’t take any links out.
GREG: Did you adjust a gear ratio or something? By mistake?
DAVE: Nope. (pause) Did you try turning it off and on?
GREG: Yeah, tried that already.
Greg turned off the machine and Dave stuck his head pretty much inside the depositor. Then he stepped back and took hold of something—I’ll assume it was the timing chain—and told Greg to turn on the mogul. As the second set of molds came forward, Dave gave the chain a brisk jerk. The Spuds came out perfect. This was not a tenable situation, though. You couldn’t have the president jerking at the mogul all day.
