Sweet Tooth

by Tim Anderson

  Text copyright © 2014 by Tim Anderson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  ISBN-13: 9781477818077

  ISBN-10: 1477818073

  Cover design by Sam Dawson

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013919514

  To Charmaine Nation (1949–2004), who was a second mother to so many, be they stroppy teenagers, abandoned dogs with personality disorders, or cats rescued from dumpsters.

  And to my dearly departed Dad, who would have only been slightly embarrassed.

  START READING

  PROLOGUE SOME CANDY TALKING

  “‘Don’t worry, Tim,…

  CHAPTER 1 LOSING STREAK

  HE’S LOST CONTROL #1 FREESTYLING

  CHAPTER 2 THE HONEYMOON PERIOD

  HE’S LOST CONTROL #2 FLAMES

  CHAPTER 3 THE BOY WITH THE THORN IN HIS SIDE

  HE’S LOST CONTROL #3 CUEBALL

  CHAPTER 4 GETTING AWAY WITH IT

  HE’S LOST CONTROL #4 MONEY EXCHANGE

  CHAPTER 5 I STARTED SOMETHING I COULDN’T FINISH

  HE’S LOST CONTROL #5 GLORIOUS PASTRIES

  CHAPTER 6 MEET ME AT THE COTERIE, WHERE WE WILL ENJOY AVOCADOS, THE VILLAGE VOICE, AND BEER OVER ICE

  HE’S LOST CONTROL #6 SWEEPING UP

  CHAPTER 7 LIKE BRET MICHAELS, BUT GAYER

  HE’S LOST CONTROL #7 SHOWER SCENE

  CHAPTER 8 MEETING WITH THE MOON GODDESS

  HE’S LOST CONTROL #8 HANG THE DJ

  CHAPTER 9 HEAVEN KNOWS I’M MISERABLE NOW

  HE’S LOST CONTROL #9 THE HEART OF DURHAM

  CHAPTER 10 STRANGEWAYS, HERE WE COME

  HE’S LOST CONTROL #10 PICCADILLY PALAVER

  CHAPTER 11 THIS CHARMING MAN

  EPILOGUE STILL ILL

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “Let Tim eat cake.”

  —Marie Antoinette

  Versailles

  (Later beheaded)

  PROLOGUE

  To a boy whose ideal snack was Little Debbie Zebra Cakes, the existence of a disease like diabetes seemed like the dark work of a mean God.

  It sounded horrifying on its face. For one thing, it actually included the word “die” in its very first syllable. And, I mean, really. A disease where you not only can’t eat sugar but also have to take multiple injections a day AND prick your finger morning, noon, and night to do a blood test? What kind of life is that? What are you supposed to eat on your birthday? On Halloween? On Saturday mornings while watching The Smurfs and The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour? The answer to all of these questions—in a world without the scourge of diabetes—is obvious: Mississippi mud cake, ice cream, Snickers, 3 Musketeers, candy corn, Mars, FireBalls, Cookie Crisp, Gobstoppers, Cap’n Crunch, Count Chocula, Franken Berry, Trix, Cocoa Puffs, Whoppers, Fruity Pebbles, Hershey’s Kisses, Key lime pie, and/or Lucky Charms.

  This was in 1980, long before type 2 diabetes—historically an affliction of the old, the fat, the unhealthy, and the hereditarily unlucky, and also known as “adult onset diabetes”—was becoming shockingly common among young people who can’t sit comfortably in front of a television without a cheeseburger in both fists. Diabetes was not terribly common among America’s youth back then. But it did happen. The first diabetic kid I ever knew was David, a guy in my second grade class at Effie Green Elementary in Raleigh, North Carolina. His older sister was friends with my older sister, and he was originally one grade ahead of me, but he had been held back a year. Why this was so was a mystery to everyone in Mrs. Fleming’s class, but it was a mystery pretty satisfactorily (if not actually) solved by one classmate’s estimation that it probably had something to do with the disease he had. That disease, of course, was diabetes.

  But the interesting thing was that David, unlike the categorically unhealthy young diabetics of today, was the most athletic kid in class. He had type 1—“juvenile”—diabetes, which made up and continues to make up about ten percent of total diabetics in the country. He had done nothing to bring on the disease; it had just happened because it was in his family, and for some reason it chose him.

  David was a star soccer player, swimmer, and runner—and was probably also a master on the uneven bars in his downtime. The kid effortlessly excelled at every sporting activity he tried. So obviously he and I weren’t friends. A scrawny, skinny kid with no apparent talent for anything besides memorizing television show theme songs, I admired him from afar for his prowess on any field and for his handsome athletic socks and cleats. Why can’t I be more like him? I wondered. Look at that golden blond hair. Those cute little freckles. The perfectly proportioned young boy’s physique. The ability to know what to do with a soccer ball when it came to him. I wanted all of that for myself. The only thing of his that I didn’t want—the only thing that, in fact, made me feel luckier than him—was his disease. Sadly, it was the only thing of his I would ultimately get.

  So, to sum up: a disease that prevents you from picking through a Whitman’s Sampler to make yourself feel better for not having any male friends; that prohibits you from accepting with a smile that lollipop offered by the bank teller at the drive-thru; that completely upends your tradition of day-after-Halloween discount candy shopping; that forces you to jab yourself day in and day out with syringes and finger prickers; and that can just happen randomly without any warning—yeah, I thought. That’ll probably happen to me one day.

  The type 1 diabetes gene is a mysterious beast—it appears out of the blue and gives few if any indications that it is indeed living in your body and getting set to ruin your young life. It lived in three of my mother’s uncles and then leapfrogged completely over her generation and avoided every single other sibling and cousin before landing squarely on me. In the summer of 1988, seven years after meeting David, my pessimistic prognostication would come true. In July of that year, I would be taken to a hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, with the highest blood sugar level they had ever recorded and would, after a lengthy midnight stay in the emergency room lobby, ultimately be diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and blasted with a boatload of insulin. I would be taken to a room in the middle of the night and, as I lay scared to death in the tightly made bed, given a Diet Shasta.

  I have always had a sweet tooth. The biggest one in my family. My skinny frame absolutely belied the number of sweets I knew I could put away if ever given the chance. Luckily, I was never given too many chances, thanks to my vigilant mother, who didn’t allow sodas in the house, didn’t buy candy or sweets, and only occasionally made pies and cakes. Once a month, she would offer to buy each of us kids a box of sweet cereal. We called it our “monthly cereal,” and I for one took this agreement between mother and child very seriously indeed. But I was the only one. My two older brothers and my sister enjoyed their boxes of Peanut Butter Crunch and Boo Berry and Honey Smacks, sure. But they didn’t desire them like I did. They didn’t hop out of bed on Saturday mornings with visions of Crunch Berries dancing in their heads. They really could take it or leave it.

  As a child, I looked forward with great pleasure to a time far in the future when I would reach full manhood and could live my own life, free of the constraints of a sensible mother’s imposed dietary restrictions; a life full of MoonPies, Little Debbies, Kit Kats, Fig Newtons, Cadbury Easter eggs, Hershey Bar pies, Twinkies, and Girl Scout cookies, all washed down with a giant-assed Yoo-hoo. This is the life I saw for myself as I sat at my desk in Mrs. Fleming’s class, lazily gazing over a
t David as he reached into his desk to retrieve his blood glucose monitor and took out his horrible medieval instruments of death. He would momentarily use this mysterious equipment to prick himself, obtain a blood sample, and test his blood sugar level before enjoying his afternoon snack, a small collection of saltine-and-peanut-butter crackers wrapped in tinfoil.

  Wow, I probably thought. That is a snack simply begging to be dipped in chocolate.

  When accompanying my mother to the grocery store I could easily spend a half hour in the candy aisle, noting to myself all of the Hershey products I would stock my cupboards with—not to mention the punch bowls full of fun-sized malted milk balls and sugar-coated gumdrops I would have laying around and available for instant gratification in every room—once I was grown up and master of my own destiny and snacks. Of course, on those trips I would arrive home with not so much as a single solitary chunk of chocolate or piece of candy corn. But oh, the things I could convince myself I was eating (Crunch bars! Chips Ahoy! Cracker Jack!) as I sat on the floor of our living room in front of the television, peeled a banana during my evening game shows, and, in a fit of profound gustatory frustration, shoved it into my mouth.

  The urge for sugar throughout my young life was strong, yes. I wanted it, and I wanted it bad, from the moment I was born.

  But as you grow older, the world gets more complicated, and there are more important things to deal with than a silly need for Toblerones or Nutter Butters. As my fifteen-year-old body was, unbeknownst to me, rapidly depleting its reserves of insulin, it was also under siege from another equally dangerous and debilitating force: raging adolescent hormones. Hormones directing my thoughts, commandeering my innocent hands, and insisting that they do an odd, immoral, and exquisite thing in bed, in the dark, in the middle of the night, with a box of Kleenex handy. Worse, the hormonal urges behind this thing I was doing could best be described as “pretty damn gay.”

  Now, I’d done some experimenting a few years before with Derrick, a boy on my Little League team. “Experimenting,” like a scientist would do—testing out what it was like to kiss a boy, to explore a naked male body with my hungry hands, to put a stiff dong in my mouth. These types of utterly scientific things. But they were just meaningless childhood activities, things that we would only do with each other and nobody else, ever, because we were just bored, you know? I hadn’t seen him since I’d gone to middle school. And yet three years later the urge to get back into the lab was still very strong, and getting harder to ignore. Derrick was back in my life on an almost nightly basis, whether he knew it or not.

  My pulsating pink hormones were on fire that June and turned me into something of a small-time crook. I was visiting my aunt and grandmother in Jamestown, New York, for the month of June, something I’d done every summer since I was a toddler. And though I loved Aunt Sue and Nana dearly, their previously exquisite delightful company became less and less fulfilling to me the older I got and the further I ventured into the thorny, throbbing, slick, and sweaty swampland that was teenage sex obsession. Sure, I still liked sitting down with Nana at one p.m. every weekday to have a cup of tea and listen to Paul Harvey on her old-fashioned radio tuner. Yes, I could be convinced to play a few happy hands of gin rummy with Aunt Sue or King’s Corner with their ancient neighbor Sheila. And of course, I was never not interested in going out to Friendly’s for a tuna melt and a hot fudge sundae. But this particular summer, there was a battle going on between my brain, my heartbeat, my sweat glands, and my loins that could not be quelled with a few scoops of ice cream. What on earth could do the quelling? Follow me into the newsagent.

  One day I went there with Aunt Sue so she could pick up a paper on her way down to the grocery store. As always, I made a beeline for the rack of music magazines that lined a shelf on the far wall. Aunt Sue paid for her newspaper and asked me if I wanted to stay and read while she shopped. I nodded silently as I flipped through the latest issue of Billboard and waited for her to leave. Because I’d just seen a stack of magazines on the floor behind me that had apparently just been dropped off—still bound together by a plastic strap—that looked interesting.

  The magazine was called Bolt, and it was as glossy as the dickens. On its cover was a close-up photo of a blond surfer dude with glassy blue eyes and an overheated expression on his face, like he’d just run up a steep staircase, bench-pressed a Toyota, or eaten a spoonful of wasabi. In my naïveté, I’d assumed it was an exercise magazine, much like the hyper-homoerotic Exercise for Men that I’d always enjoyed flipping through at my local grocery store in Raleigh and which invariably featured on its cover stripped, ripped, and ready hunks with abs that could utterly destroy you.

  I looked over at the owner of the shop, who was busy selling lottery tickets to a customer at the cash register, then bent down and pulled an issue from the top of the stack, making sure not to tear the plastic strap holding the other slippery issues together like naked oiled-up soccer players caught in a net. Turning my back to the register, I opened it. The first image I came to—of a blond surfer (named “Dylan”) and another guy who appeared to be a really good friend of his (“Cody”) getting all grabby with each other’s crotches—made me gasp. I immediately closed the magazine and looked around to make sure I hadn’t disturbed anyone over at the cash register. I was relieved to find that the line was growing with customers and that no one was paying me any mind, but I did notice that above the checkout counter a giant round convex security mirror was mounted, allowing the owner to get a clear view of the back of the store and, in particular, the shelves of porno mags against the far wall, separated from the rest of the magazines by two swinging saloon doors with the obligatory warning that if you are not eighteen you’d better just git. This, it turned out, was my lucky day: The new stack of Bolt magazines had arrived just as the store was getting busy, so the owner hadn’t had a chance to spirit them away yet. I set down the issue of Bolt, hiding it behind an issue of Rolling Stone, and, breathless and desperate, began perfunctorily picking up and pretending to thumb through Musician, Spin, and Billboard, returning to the Bolt magazine as often as possible to get another look at Dylan and Cody’s tea party.

  After a few more minutes of surreptitiously stealing glances at Bolt, I decided that no force in the world—not God, not jail, and definitely not a freaking convex mirror—could keep me from taking that magazine home with me and reading it from cover to cover, all night if necessary, until I was good and sore. I looked over at the register again and saw that the owner was bagging up some two-liter bottles of soda for the last customer in line, so it was now or never. I turned away from him and faced the back of the store, where another convex security mirror on the far wall captured me on its stupid fat face. I quickly lifted up my T-shirt and stuffed the magazine in, flat against my clammy waist, half above the belt, half below. I then calmly, steadily walked out of the store, briefly locking eyes with the owner, whose vaguely menacing expression—probably my paranoid imagining—seemed to say to me, “You know, son, fags don’t ever win the lottery.” I didn’t care, though. I had something under my shirt (and down my pants) that you couldn’t put a price on: a big old hunk of sugar named Dylan.

  I got that magazine home, immediately locked myself in the bathroom, sat down on the furry toilet seat, and jerked myself silly while looking at the most beautiful pictures I’d ever seen in my life. Dudes. Naked dudes. With other naked dudes. With rock-hard bodies. Chowing down on each other like chocolate. And not a limp wrist or Judy Garland album in sight. The scorching collection of glossy, rippled studs in the pages of Bolt notwithstanding, I still remained somewhat convinced that real gay men didn’t look like these guys—that gay men in the real world just couldn’t convincingly wear a football jersey or boxing shorts and found the urge to wear makeup, go to cosmetology school, visit piano bars, and snap just too hard to resist. The only gay men I’d ever met (that I knew of) were two guys who went to our church, sang in the choir, and were active in our local Little Theatre. Nic
e salt-of-the-earth guys, but about as butch as hot cocoa. And being the only real-world example I had of what gay men were, they were naturally what all gay men were. But Bolt magazine allowed me to imagine a world in which hot dudes, if offered enough money, could be cajoled into doing any number of things that would make the crushing loneliness of the future gay life I figured was my destiny a little less weepy and desperate.

  Now, I’m not at all suggesting that my descent at age fifteen into the deep, dark dungeon of delicious, honey-dipped immorality fondue that became my gay porno mag obsession led directly to God’s decision to punish me one month later with a disease that would render my future plans for that house made of Heath bars and Pillsbury cream cheese icing with the picket fence constructed of white-chocolate-covered pretzels completely unrealistic. That would be absurd. All I know is this: The week after I pilfered that gorgeous magazine and started reading it every day at least once, I started getting up in the middle of the night—sometimes two or three times—to go to the bathroom, something I’d never done before, ever. What I didn’t know was that, though my young body had finally achieved a much-needed helping of sexual satisfaction, it was also in the early stages of insulin depletion. In the following weeks my blood sugar would continue to rise and I would start to experience most of the classic symptoms of the newly diabetic: incredible thirst, constant need to go to the bathroom, blurry vision, and overwhelming lethargy. One month later, on a school trip stopover in Baltimore, I found myself wandering through the Baltimore Orioles stadium so dehydrated I could barely open my mouth and with vision so blurred I could scarcely make out the collect call instructions on the pay phone I eventually found to call my mother back in Raleigh.

  “Mom, there’s something wrong with me,” I said when I finally reached her. Well, there were several things wrong with me, but probably better to take them one at a time.