Sweet Tooth

by Tim Anderson

  “What’s this clay sculpture you’ve made, Tim?”

  “It’s my dead pancreas. His name is Fran.”

  Perhaps a diabetes fashion show.

  “Christine is wearing a peach fleece hoodie from L.L.Bean. It’s a cotton/polyester blend and has three sleeves—two for her arms and one special one sewn into the back to hold all the diabetes stuff she has to cart around with her all day, every day, forever. Dazzling!”

  Or a diabetes open-mike comedy jam.

  “So I was goin’ down on this fat diabetic midget, and…”

  “Oliver, off the stage!”

  I couldn’t imagine what I was going to get out of this camp that I couldn’t get by just staying at home reading the stupid packets the hospital had given me and feeling sorry for myself.

  “You’re going,” Mom said in the tone of voice she uses when she’s not going to take any more bullshit whining from you.

  The first indication that something was not quite right on the first day was when Mom and I entered the building to check in and saw that the room was full of kids who were at least five years younger than me. The second indication was when we found out from one of the camp directors that Mom had mistakenly signed me up for the wrong camp. This one was for diabetic kids aged six to ten. This was great news because there were several boxes of Nabs in the cupboard and a six-pack of Fresca in the fridge at home, and if we hurried we could make it in time to watch The Love Boat reruns they play on TBS before the soaps start.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize that!” Mom said to the director. “Can he still participate? He’s really been looking forward to it, and he was just diagnosed a few weeks ago!” Mom was clearly playing hardball. I rolled my eyes and sauntered away, slumping into a chair at a table in the corner, watching six-year-olds chase each other around the room screaming and laughing, blissful in their ignorance of how complicated life gets when you’re midway through the first set of double digits.

  Mom came and sat down, letting her purse slide down her arm and land on the tabletop.

  “They said it’s fine for you to stay, so I’m just going to leave you to it,” she said. I rolled my eyes again, and when I was finished rolling them I pointed them at her. She met my gaze, and I looked away, sighing again and sucking my teeth. The director clapped her hands to call everyone to attention. I couldn’t believe I was having to spend my day with these kids. I was Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club.

  “Excuse me, sir? I think there’s been a mistake. I know it’s Diabetes Day Camp, but I don’t think I belong in here.”

  Mom was quiet. I looked over at her a few moments later and saw that she was crying. Now, that is something I have never been able to take, Mom crying. There’s no worse sight that a son’s behavior can bring about. It hit me in the gut, and I immediately felt like an ass.

  “Mom,” I whispered, trying to be discreet lest we draw the attention of all the elementary school imps in our midst. “It’s OK, really. It’s fine.”

  “I’m just trying so hard, Tim,” she sobbed. Yes, she was sobbing now. “I thought this would be good for you and that you’d enjoy yourself. I didn’t know that…this.” At “this” she looked over at the gaggle of young hobgoblins, one of whom was picking his nose and wiping his finger on the rim of his glasses.

  “Mom, really, I’ll stay. It’s fine. I’m sorry. I just, you know, was hoping there’d be some kids here my age.” Like the platonic ideal of the clueless teenager, I was only now realizing that it wasn’t just me who had gone through an upheaval in recent weeks. Mom had also been shaken to her core by the experience of having her youngest child so close to death (I almost died!), and she was struggling to adjust to the new reality of what this disease meant for me and for her. And I wasn’t helping things by being such an asshole. What would Nurse Kimberly say if she saw me now? Something inappropriate and mean, but also something with a real underlying truth to it, buried deep beneath its sneering contempt. Something like “So I see you’ve made your mother cry again. What happened, did she find out about your crush on Kevin the serial killer on General Hospital?”

  “I know,” Mom said, still blubbering a little, wiping her tears and her nose with a tissue she grabbed from her purse.

  “Just go on home, Mom. I should probably go join everyone else.”

  So Mom stood up and prepared to leave. She probably wanted to give me a hug good-bye, but I was still a fifteen-year-old in a public space, so that wasn’t going to happen.

  “I’ll see you at four,” she said, and she walked out. I nodded and walked over to join the others. There were about twenty kids total, and they were sitting at tables with their blood glucose testing equipment and their glucose diaries out and ready to be filled in with their midmorning blood sugar levels. I sat down at the end of one of the tables, flopped my diabetes case onto the table, and retrieved from it my glucometer, finger pricker, and diary.

  “Hi,” a little girl with thick glasses sitting next to me said.

  “Hi,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Amanda. I’m eight. How many shots a day do you take?”

  “Two. How about you?”

  “Eh, I take four, sometimes five. Depends.”

  I nodded my head. “Wow. That’s a lot.”

  “Yeah, but I’m used to it. I give them to myself.”

  There’s nothing like being shamed by an eight-year-old girl into feeling like you’re making out pretty well, all things considered. Kimberly would have said as much, if in slightly less polite terminology and while also suggesting I was probably too old to be hanging out with such young children.

  Amanda pushed the button on her finger pricker and sprung it into action against her index finger. The blood specimen she squeezed out was judged too paltry, so she cocked the pricker again and chose a different finger, not missing a beat.

  Inspired, I picked up my pricker, placed a new lancet in the chamber, and placed it against my middle digit. Then, in communion with twenty six- to ten-year-olds, I proceeded to stab myself in the finger with a souped-up thumbtack and squeeze out some blood as a sacrifice to the God of Diseases You Can Live With.

  The boy is making pancakes. They smell great, all buttery. He’s getting ready to test out his new sugar-free pancake syrup, so it’s an exciting morning for him. He’s also frying up some bacon, because why not?

  His older brother is in the living room reading the newspaper. He just stopped by to get some food because he’s in college and doesn’t have any of his own. There’s no one else home.

  The boy has just flipped over the three pancakes in the pan and is now flattening them with the spatula. He’s pretty hungry, hasn’t eaten yet this morning, though he’s taken a few chomps of bacon here and there. He’s been holding back, though, because he wants to wait and eat everything at once, on one big plate. He took his insulin shot about an hour ago so his body should be ready to receive.

  It’s kind of hot in the kitchen, he starts thinking. He turns on the fan above the stove to disperse some of the smoke rising from the pan of bacon. He wipes some sweat from his brow and his cheek and his nose, then saunters into the hall bathroom to do something. Let’s follow him in there.

  He turns on the shower. That was unexpected. Now he’s gone over to the sink and is looking at himself in the mirror. Strange, but he doesn’t seem to actually see himself. He just stares blankly, as if he’s looking at the wallpaper in the reflection behind him. He goes back out to the kitchen, returns to his skillets, and flips the pancakes and the bacon again.

  He’s really sweating now, so he backs away from the stove, bumping into the kitchen table. He ungracefully moves around it with his hands on the tabletop and sits down in the first chair he comes to. It’s a good call on his part, stepping away from the heat of that stove, but it probably would have been a good idea for him to turn that burner off before adjourning to a seat. He’s sitting now with his sweaty head in his clammy hands, while just a few feet away,
pancakes and bacon are starting to burn. Damn, and those pancakes were just about perfect a minute ago, golden brown and ready for more butter and then some syrup. And the bacon was nearly done, too; crispy but not too crispy. But now it appears both are quickly passing through the threshold separating “delightfully edible” from “carcinogenic.” Smoke is rising from the pans more and more furiously, and oh, shit, where’d he go?

  He’s back in the bathroom. He’s turned off the shower and is now just sitting on the toilet with the seat down. Steam from the shower has filled the room, so he’s a little hard to see now. OK, his head is in his hands, but now instead of resting in them it’s kind of bobbing around on them like a buoy on the surface of a lake after a motorboat drives past it.

  “Tim! Tim?”

  His brother is calling him. The brother’s just caught a whiff of that burned pancake smell. He gets up and walks over to the kitchen, where a smoke monster is throwing a tantrum on the stove. He turns off the burners, and looks around for the boy, who was just here a minute ago, humming to himself and getting his breakfast ready.

  The brother walks down the hallway and stops at the doorway to the bathroom, seeing the boy and his bobbing head.

  “Tim! What’s going on?”

  The boy whips his head up as if his power switch has just been turned on. He turns and looks at his brother. He’s just realized something: He’s absolutely starving and is really really REALLY craving something sweet. Needs something sweet. If he doesn’t get something sweet right now he will absolutely die of disappointment (and a seizure). Crunch Berries? he thinks. Do we have Crunch Berries?

  The boy stands up and walks straight past his brother and back into the kitchen, where delicious pancakes and mouthwatering bacon go to die. He throws open the cupboard to see what cereals are on offer. His movements are overdone, like he’s not fully in control of his limbs and so is approximating the correct gestures. Sadly, there aren’t any Crunch Berries, but there are some Oh’s, so he pulls the box out, tears it open, grabs a bowl and spoon from a drawer, lifts the milk jug out of the refrigerator, and sits down. His brother stands off to the side, watching him do his weird Kabuki with anthropological interest. It’s like a monkey playing Ping-Pong: kind of human, kind of not.

  The boy has quickly prepared his cereal and is chomping down on those Oh’s like he has not eaten in weeks. It’s delicious. But wait a minute. Something is weird. It tastes good, but it also tastes weird. Mmm, he thinks, this cereal is good! But it’s weird.

  The boy looks at the gallon of milk on the table. It’s some weird-looking milk. He squints at it. Oh, OK, see there? That’s why that milk looks weird. It’s a gallon of water.

  He looks down at his bowl of cereal. The Oh’s are still piled high in the bowl even though he’s had several mouthfuls. He digs his spoon in and chomps down on a few more. The pile of Oh’s is going down now, and the boy is starting to see the cloudy H2O peeking through the gaps in his cereal.

  Water? Is that water? the boy is clearly thinking.

  His brother sits down next to him as he finishes the bowl of Oh’s.

  “Are you all right, man?”

  The boy is chomping and isn’t able to answer yet. He’ll need a few more minutes before he’s communicado.

  In the meantime, he’ll just keep eating. He refills his bowl, then takes the gallon of water and pours more of it onto his cereal.

  Because it was weird, but it was kind of good.

  CHAPTER 3

  I was lying on my back on our carpeted staircase, my feet up the stairs from me and my head on the bottom step, listening to the music coming out of my sister’s first-floor bedroom. The room had French doors made out of plywood left over from a renovation job we’d done in the living room, and they didn’t fit together all that well. Hollow and flimsy, they would do absolutely nothing to save you from, say, Jack Nicholson in The Shining—in fact, they’d surrender quite willingly—but this meant that they formed a negligible barrier between me and the New Wave stylings of whatever fey and sexually ambiguous band was coming out of her speakers at any given moment.

  Two years older than me, Laurie was a full-fledged New Wave chick, a tall, thin waif with effortless style and long, naturally curly blonde hair; a thrift-store maverick who wasn’t afraid to go to school wearing a tuxedo shirt, a paisley vest, a calfskin miniskirt, pinstriped purple tights, and monkey boots. Or just a black cotton dress and no makeup. I longed for that kind of bravery. I’d never been able to really dress myself properly, and when I was gearing up to go to high school the year before, Laurie had taken it upon herself to attempt a makeover of her sloppy younger brother.

  Part of this involved convincing me to grow my hair out a little bit and get some wingtips, button-up shirts, and tasteful vests, as well as introducing me to the world of what she called “progressive” music. She got my feet wet with gateway bands, like REM and The Cure, and I was a little slow on the uptake. I’d spent my entire life listening to Top 40 and John Williams movie soundtracks, and had recently, of course, been on a Christian rock kick. Laurie was up against years and years of my devotion to Cyndi Lauper and Madonna and Exposé and The Pointer Sisters and Juice Newton. Those ladies wouldn’t go without a fight.

  Laurie had one tool in her toolbox she wasn’t even aware of, though—her boyfriend Brian, who was a freshman at UNC–Chapel Hill with an awesome coif and a smashing wardrobe. He had the appearance of an MTV-ready New Romantic, and if he wasn’t wearing a skinny tie, he always looked like he should be. I coveted his black cardigan and his houndstooth slacks. He’d recently made Laurie a few mixtapes that he had titled “Numerous Dandy Tunes” and “Even More Dandy Tunes,” and these tapes were constantly on her stereo system. Even though she’d made me my own copies, whenever the hollow-cheeked echo of the mixtapes reached me up in my room, I went out to the top of the stairs and listened, falling hard for the majesty that was Love and Rockets, The Smiths, The Mighty Lemon Drops, Echo and the Bunnymen, New Order, The Psychedelic Furs, XTC, The Icicle Works, The Cult, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and Modern English.

  Though I’d been passively listening to her music for a year or so, it was only that summer that those mixtapes really made an impact on me. They also made me realize that there was a Morrissey-shaped hole in my life that I had been futilely trying to fill with Michael W. Smith. Best known for his anthem to chaste Christian love, “Friends,” Smith also had a slew of fun Christian-themed electro pop songs and kind of looked like New Wave Jesus. It had long been my firm belief—and if not a firm belief, then a powerful fantasy—that if there was a man in the world who would ride into my life on the back of a white horse and carry me away to his castle, he would be carrying around his neck a Casio CZ-1000 keyboard and playing the synth line from “Cars” by Gary Numan. Michael W. Smith had lots of Casios, I was sure. Also, he could read me Bible verses while we made out, which might help neutralize the damnation that awaited us later on.

  Behind Laurie’s closed doors, Morrissey crooned something about me not having earned it yet, baby.

  Oh, I thought. I must suffer and cry for a longer time? Yep, sounds about right. It was the first Smiths song I’d ever heard, and it forever altered the things I would demand from my music. How on earth could Michael W. Smith’s Christian bromides possibly compete with the hard truths of “Shoplifters of the World Unite”? Morrissey’s palpable, comic bitterness made me wonder if he had recently been cruelly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes as punishment for having dirty fantasies about hot gay surfer orgies. Because it felt as if he were singing directly at me, knowingly pointing his index finger at my troubled face, barely able to hold his hand up with his limp gay wrist. I hadn’t earned it yet, baby, and he knew because he hadn’t earned it yet, either, baby.

  As Morrissey continued over-enunciating his Portrait of the Artist as a Gangly and Unlovable Freak who must stay on his own for slightly longer, I continued to lie there, upside down on the stairs, nodding my head to the beat. This charming
man certainly didn’t have all the answers, but he did ask better questions. Like “What Difference Does It Make?” and “Is It Really So Strange?” and “How Soon Is Now?” As the blood rushing into my head threatened to start seeping out of my nostrils, I wondered to myself, “How soon is now?”

  But Brian’s mix wasn’t all bleak: The next song on the tape was pretty much the antidote to Morrissey’s dreary “life’s a bitch and then you cry” sob story. It was Sinéad O’Connor’s “Mandinka,” and its message to me basically boiled down to “Fuck all y’all, I ain’t sorry.”

  Atop a driving drum beat and a snarling guitar lick, Sinéad screeched into her no-doubt-petrified microphone about not feeling no shame and not feeling no pain, visiting several octaves in the process. This pale, bald woman was sure pissed about something, and it sounded marvelous. Who was this Mandinka guy, and what did he do to this woman? Or maybe Sinéad has also been cruelly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes after having fantasies of hot gay surfer orgies? Hers was a Catholic God, after all, and That Guy sure knew how to instill the guilt. But Sinéad was having none of it.

  In any case, I envied Sinéad’s ability to emote artfully, and longed to be like her—unapologetic, ferocious, and able to flawlessly pull off a shaved head. Sadly, my head was not the right shape for any of that, and I was also a weak, self-pitying moppet, so ever since Baltimore I’d been languishing indoors, slouching from room to room staring at walls, looking with bitterness at the refrigerator that housed my insulin vials and the sweet tea that I could no longer drink, and sitting in the living room watching TV, getting ever so slightly turned on by the dude who hosted the Bodies in Motion exercise show on ESPN.

  Or lying upside down on the stairs listening to the jams exploding out of Laurie’s speakers, playing air keyboard, and waiting for my knight with a shiny Casio to come riding in and play me something I could dance to.