Sweet Tooth

by Tim Anderson

  The summer had turned into a major fiasco. It had started with the promise of sun, sailing, and soapy showers with boys: It was stiff, locked, and loaded. Ready for takeoff. Fit to burst. Pulsating. The beginning of summer 1988 was a throbbing teenage hard-on, is what I’m saying.

  And here I was just two short months later, limping toward the end of August, battered and bewildered, and facing the specter of another year of school without having done anything of note over the summer besides acquiring an awesome new disease and a hilariously callous break-up letter from my girlfriend.

  The point is, I was due for a little tantrum. Kimberly the nurse would have disagreed, saying something along the lines of “You know, Tim, it may seem right now like the weight of the world is on your shoulders and that there’s no light at the end of the tunnel and that God is punishing you for something and that you are all alone in the world, but you know what? It is, there isn’t, he is, and you are.” But Kimberly had no idea that she was talking to a grade-A top-shelf drama queen, and that I didn’t care that she didn’t care, I was ready to hurl a coffee mug on the floor, break it, and then feel stupid and toss it in the garbage can before anyone saw what dumb thing I’d just done.

  Mom and Dad could see that I was having trouble adjusting to my new diabetic lifestyle. For one thing, I was rolling my eyes and doing that annoying teeth-sucking thing in response to things they said, more than usual. One night they were out on the deck in the backyard, sitting on the patio swing in the pitch-black darkness because the deck light had burned out, and they called me out to talk to me.

  “Tim,” Mom began, “you’ve really got to get a handle on yourself. You’re just staying inside watching television all the time. I know you’re upset about Dawn…”

  Upset about who? Oh yeah, Dawn, my now ex-girlfriend, who would have broken up with me via text message if the technology had existed. Yeah, I guess I was supposed to be upset about that whole thing. But somehow I wasn’t really.

  “But we’re worried that you’re just spending too much time alone, at home. You should be out more. School’s coming up. I know you’ve been through a lot with your diabetes, but we feel like you are not adjusting as well as you should.”

  At that, I rolled my eyes.

  “Tim, don’t roll your eyes at us,” Dad admonished, without missing a beat.

  How he could have known I rolled my eyes is beyond me, since it was as dark as the dickens out there. But he knew. God, not only was I irritating, I was also predictable. How is a snotty teenager supposed to respond to being called out like that? If I’d been more like Sinéad, I would have raised up my hand, looked pensively at the floor, and said something like “Don’t know no shame, don’t feel no pain.” Except maybe when I prick my finger in the same place twice in a row. Otherwise I’m a strong, proud, bald Irish woman.

  But really I was just a delicate little mini-Morrissey wannabe, with a twee little chip on my shoulder and a full head of lustrous hair. If I could have verbalized what was in my head, I would probably only have been able to quote Morrissey lyrics, because I was no poet and I sure did know that thing.

  “I’ve seen this happen in other people’s lives, and now it’s happening in mine.” Something along those lines.

  But Mom and Dad, like most other humans, wouldn’t have understood any of these non sequiturs, because what on earth did they have to do with my diabetes diagnosis or my breakup? And besides, Mom might say, there are plenty of other girls out there besides Dawn. There’s plenty of time to find love. And Mom would have a point. There were plenty of girls out there. Plenty. Lots. Way too many, in fact.

  Anyway, it was decided that Mom, Dad, and I would go on an outing to Kerr Lake the next day. Dad would take the day off from work, and we’d go waterskiing in our new used motorboat, which we kept parked at Presbyterian Point, a campground on the lake near the North Carolina–Virginia border that was owned by our church. It wasn’t nude parasailing at Saranac Lake with Brad, but at least I could pretend I was one of The Go-Go’s in the “Vacation” video as I skied around the lake behind a boat pulled by my dad and in the back of which my mom sat enthusiastically waving at me. Surely that was the next best thing.

  On the drive up to Presbyterian Point, I was able to force my parents to listen to the “Dandy Tunes” collections. We had just crossed the Virginia border and were midway through the first tape when I found myself wanting to hear something more visceral, more tied up in knots, more offensive to my parents. I got Sinéad’s The Lion and the Cobra out of my plastic bag of cassettes. On this album, old baldy was unhinged, raw, crazy, possessive, horny, schizophrenic, and pissed, much like myself. She beautifully verbalized and gave voice to the bilious stuff swirling around in my head and stomach. Mom and Dad would take one listen to the songs on this album and realize the pain I was in.

  By the third song, “Jerusalem,” Mom had made up her mind about the quality of the music coming out of our Chevy Corsica’s speakers.

  “Tim, she’s just screaming. This is terrible.”

  “What?” I said, turning the volume up.

  “How can you enjoy something like this?” But Mom’s screaming was drowned out by Sinéad as she spat something about next time being the last time and you better not two-time if you want the best time ’cause there ain’t gonna be a next time.

  I dimmed my eyelids and looked at my mom as if to say, “Whatever can I add to that?”

  We got to Presbyterian Point, lugged the boat to the water, and sputtered out into the middle of the lake. It took me a while to hit my stride on the skis. The first five or ten times I either fell forward, fell sideways, fell backward, or lost a ski as I attempted to rise like a phoenix out of the water. I was exhausted by the time I managed to stand upright and make a single swing around the lake. Naturally, I fell while attempting a Belinda Carlisle wave in the direction of the imaginary camera off in the distance. It seemed like a good time to take a break.

  I flopped into the boat, breathing heavily.

  “You should probably test your blood sugar,” Mom said, looking into her day-bag to fish out my black diabetes case.

  I snarled like Billy Idol and prepared to let out a rebel yell. I was not in a blood sugar testing mood.

  “Oh, I’ll do that a little later, I just want to relax right now,” I said, putting on my sunglasses and lying back on the cushioned row of seats in the back of the tiny boat. I watched out of the corner of my eye as Mom, wearing her blue visor with the message TODAY IS THE DAY THAT THE LORD HATH MADE stitched into it, looked back at me, disgruntled. She sat holding the black case, concerned but not wanting to push it, since I was being such a petulant imp these days and it sure didn’t take much to set me off.

  I continued sunning myself, but because I’m such a pushover and could see through my sunglasses that Mom was still holding the black case in her hands a few minutes later as she stared off into space, I sat up slowly and, with the requisite huff, held out my hand and waited for her to deposit the diabetes equipment into my palm.

  I unzipped the case and got out the glucometer, placing it precariously on my knee. God, I hated this thing. With its smug, know-it-all digital display and its oversized buttons and its beeping. The way it existed to bring me irritating news about how I’ve been failing in my diabetes regimen. And the way it had to be coaxed into giving me the information I needed from it—not only did this bloodthirsty glucose robot insist that I stab myself in the finger to get a specimen, it also demanded that I feed it with a large enough blood droplet to satisfy it, which meant milking my finger for blood as if it were a cow’s teat, which it most assuredly was not. Then I had to maneuver my blood onto the test strip, press the timer on the meter, and wait for a minute before being prompted by three beeps to blot the strip and stick it into the meter so it could be read after another minute. Sometimes after all that the meter would not even give me a number, it would just say ERR, meaning “error,” which translated to “You’ve done something wrong, y
ou idiot, try again.” And I’d have to start over.

  Mom hovered over me like a parole officer. She was not doing this to be a scold. She was concerned. She was curious. She wanted to make sure I was not about to die again. But I didn’t appreciate any of this at the time. I just wanted to be alone with my glucometer, do my business, and put the damn thing back in the case without making a big production out of it. But there Mom was, leaning forward to get a better view of the big production.

  I took a stupid alcohol swab out of the damned case and then took a dumb-ass test strip out of the infernal container and cocked the shitty lancing device and looked at my frigging fingers to decide which of my dumb digits would get the jab. The index finger on my left hand wasn’t too scabby from pricking, so index finger it was. I massaged the finger for a minute—milking it, as it were—then swabbed it with the alcohol wipe. I waved the finger around to dry it, then pressed the lancing device against the pulsating finger, and pressed the trigger.

  Boing!

  “Ow, fuck!” I said, shaking my finger furiously and sprinkling blood droplets onto my face. The lancet felt like it had hit bone, though my finger was probably just raw from all the recent pricks it had been enduring as the nipple of choice.

  I looked at Mom and realized I had just said the f-word out loud.

  “Uh, sorry. That really hurt,” I said, wiping the blood off my forehead. Mom remained silent.

  If Kimberly the nurse had been on that motorboat, she would have narrowed her eyes and said, “Man up, Nancy,” then slapped me with a rubber flipper, because she would have just had one handy.

  Thankfully, I had enough blood still oozing out of my finger even after losing some of it to my face, so I was able to squeeze out a healthy droplet, lift my finger up and over, and place the droplet onto the dual-tiled strip. I touched the button on the glucometer to start the timer, and sat back and held the strip in my fingers as the digits on the screen counted down.

  “Is your finger OK?” Mom asked, still registering disappointment on her face over my f-word slip.

  “Yeah, it’s just sore ’cause I use that one a lot,” I said, trying to segue into Reasonable Tim mode, knowing full well that I’d been swimming in incredibly bratty waters for the better part of the day.

  Beep. Beep. Beeeeeeeep.

  I dabbed the strip, wiping it clean of blood, and inserted it into the glucometer for final judgment, which would arrive after a minute-long intermission.

  “Thanks for bringing me here today,” I said, looking guiltily down at the floor of the boat.

  “Well, we’re glad we could all be together,” Mom said. Translation: “You’re welcome, now stop your cussin’, and can you please quit pouting like a little bitch?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Beeeeeeeep.

  It was time to read the verdict. Mom leaned forward.

  God, please don’t let it be in the 200s, God, please don’t let it be in the 200s, I kept thinking, my eyes closed. I really want a snack.

  I opened my eyes and calmly gazed toward the digital display on my lap.

  ERR, it said. Error.

  This is when things started happening in slow motion. When I saw that message staring me in the face, my eyeballs filled with flames, and smoke shot out of both of my ears. My eyeballs bulged, threatening to pop out of their sockets, my head twitched, my throat tightened, and my hands seized up as I received signals from the devilish voices in my head to Kill. That. Glucometer. Kill it.

  With a Grendel-like growl, I picked the glucometer up in a slow and drawn-out fashion, and threw it down on the floor of the boat.

  This act of devastating violence and sabotage took about five minutes to play out in my head. In Mom’s and Dad’s, it took about five seconds, I’m pretty sure.

  “Tim!” Mom said, crouching down to grab the machine.

  “Tim, what are you doing?” Dad said, whipping around from his perch at the steering wheel. “What happened?”

  I sat back against the cushioned seats, staring at the floor. Mom picked up the glucometer, which was, amazingly, still in one piece. Because even when I’m having a monstrous fit, I still can’t break a piece of equipment about as indestructible as a TV remote.

  Mom pressed the power button on the machine. “Well, it turns on,” she said.

  She handed it to me, and I looked it over. The display, once a perfect rectangle with a pristine gray screen and digits formed by sharp, blade-like strokes, was now warped. A plastic piece inside was now bending upward into the screen, clouding the digital display. But it still worked.

  Dammit.

  So I went through the bloody ritual once more, swabbing a fingertip, jabbing myself, squeezing the blood out, placing it on the strip, waiting, blotting, inserting the strip, waiting, hoping, praying.

  ERR.

  I rolled my eyes. Then I looked quickly over at Dad to make sure he hadn’t seen me do that.

  “It says ‘error’ again,” I said.

  Mom looked at me and then at the glucometer.

  “Well, I guess we’ll have to take it in to the Diabetes Center and get a new one,” she said. She shot me a look that conveyed in no uncertain terms that she was embarrassed for me.

  “I’d better eat something, just in case,” I said, avoiding her gaze and tearing open a packet of Nabs.

  “You ready, honey?” Dad asked.

  “Oh yeah,” Mom said, putting on her life vest. It was her turn for a wipeout in the water. Dad revved up the boat engine again, and Mom jumped in.

  Dad put the boat in gear, and we blasted off. After a few moments, Mom rose triumphantly out of the water, effortlessly gliding upon the surface like an only slightly drunk Rockette. We went around the lake, and she remained regally upright, sprays of water shooting up all around her like she was some Busby Berkeley water dancer. I excitedly waved to her. She waved back, then lost her grip on the rope handle, and sank into the wake left by our boat.

  Debbie, the lady at the Diabetes Center, sat down with me in the back of the shop to give me a little pep talk.

  “Here you go,” she said, handing me a new glucometer. “It’s got a new battery in it already, so you don’t need to worry about that.”

  “Thanks a lot.” I wondered if Mom had had to pay for this one. She was browsing in the front of the shop.

  “Yeah, hopefully this one will last for you. I know that these things can get frustrating sometimes, especially when you’re new to the whole thing.”

  I thought Mom and I had agreed that we wouldn’t tell the good people at the Diabetes Center that I’d had a major freakout and hurled my defenseless glucometer onto the floor of a motorboat in hopes of shattering it into a million pieces, managing only to warp it a little. But it seemed like Debbie, though she wasn’t saying it outright, knew the truth.

  “You know, one of these days,” she continued, “maybe they’ll come out with a way of testing your levels by just, I don’t know, licking a test strip and waving it in the air.”

  “That will be a great day,” I said.

  “Yeah. But, you know, for now, just try to be careful with this one. OK?” She smiled.

  I nodded, chastened.

  “Great! Well, you look like you’re doing great, and you and your mom should definitely call us if you have any problems with this one or if you just have some questions. Oh! And here, have a bar of this new sugar-free chocolate we got in.” She handed me a sample.

  “Thanks,” I said, feeling I’d seen this particular candy before.

  “It’s pretty good, better than most sugar-free stuff, I think,” she said. “Just make sure you don’t eat more than two squares in one sitting. It’ll give you pretty bad diarrhea.”

  The young man is lying on his bed in the dark with his black light on, staring up at the brand-new Sinéad O’Connor poster hanging above his bed on the wall. It’s…interesting. It features the singer’s pale bald head in immense close-up, glowing like a supernova. She’s staring off to the side a
nd upward, and she looks like a giant showroom dummy with a major chip on its shoulder. The young man thinks she looks tough, probably because she could easily kick his ass, but a Cabbage Patch doll could easily kick his ass, so he’s not the best judge of what’s tough, let’s face it.

  God, that bald amphibian head is bright. How can he even look directly at it without burning his retinas and singeing his feminine lashes? But he just lies there, eyes wide open, recklessly drinking in the glowing white light, waiting to go blind.

  He’s a little spooked right now, having just watched Fatal Attraction on video with his sister. Though he would never ever advocate sneaking into someone’s house and boiling their pet bunny in a pot, he couldn’t help but admire Glenn Close’s spunk and stick-to-it-iveness. But he found himself unable to sleep afterward because Glenn Close was also terrifying.

  So because he couldn’t get out of his head the image of Glenn losing her shit, he’d reached over and turned on his black light, igniting the ghoulish bald head that now glowed in front of him. For some reason he finds it soothing.

  His eyes are glazed over, his mind a kaleidoscope of unrelated images, the kind of manic slide show you experience in dreams when you pass out and your brain is just too tired to even bother with a storyline. But he’s awake, wide-awake and drunk on images floating in front of his face, images of Fruit Roll-Ups, eternity, Brazilian soccer player Pelé, robots, deep space, beach parties, Marlon Brando, gravity, and chopsticks. What ties all of these things together? That’s right: mystery. They’re all mysteries wrapped up in plastic enigma bags. Or maybe nothing ties them all together, who knows?

  He’s sweating mightily. He’s sitting up now and clumsily getting to his feet. He’s standing up on the bed, stepping forward toward the poster, and is now head-to-head with Sinéad. He presses his face up against hers, moving it from side to side against her giant paper cranium. It’s a true meeting of the minds. It’s also a useful way for him to rid his face of all the sweat, his primary objective.