Sweet Tooth

by Tim Anderson

“Yeah. Don’t remember much, though.”

  “Did you see that chick take all her clothes off?”

  And then it hit me. I worked backward from my last memory. Mohawk girl on the porch in her bra and panties holding a bottle. Then there was Heather and Jennifer’s big parabola head walking away from me toward the house, me watching Sarah’s car bumping and grinding on the ground, then me moving toward the car, seeing Sarah’s upside-down face in the backseat underneath an unidentifiable dude, then me sitting on the trunk, followed by me walking backward toward the farmhouse and hearing a guy in a trench coat say “Get away from me, man,” and then my hand moving away from his crotch and taking an outstretched doobie from him and putting it into my mouth.

  “Oh, my God,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Kathleen said. “It was pretty hilarious.”

  I went to my first few classes trying to avoid the gaze of anyone who might have possibly been at the party. Surely there was someone who had seen me do what I’d done and was spilling the beans all over school. Sure, being talked about can be nice, but not really if it involves the words Tim, wants, to, grab, and dicks. My paranoia escalating, I saw Heather in the hall.

  “Hey, lady,” I said, sidling up to her. “Heard any terrible rumors?”

  “Sadly, no,” Heather yawned.

  “Is this a conglomeration of pukey drunks I see before me?” Jennifer cooed, running up and jumping right in front of us. She laughed and took off her headphones, from which one could hear, if one was listening, the first song on The Cure’s Disintegration, blasting celestially.

  “Oh, shit, I remember you!” I said. “You smoke Benson and Hedges.”

  “DeLuxe Ultra Light One Hundreds,” she clarified.

  “Let’s go out to lunch today,” Heather suggested absently.

  “Sure, OK,” I said. That was a thing we’d been doing, sneaking out through the woods to go out to lunch, because we were rebels, just like all the other underclassmen who did it. “Jennifer, you wanna come?”

  But she already had her headphones back on and was backing away to get to class. She saw me looking at her quizzically.

  “YEAH, IT’S AWESOME! I CAN’T STOP LISTENING TO IT!” she assured me.

  Heather and I ended up at Wendy’s on Falls of Neuse Road. At no time did Heather give any indication that she’d seen me do anything untoward at the party, even when I gave her an opportunity to tell me.

  “You know, I don’t remember a lot about Saturday. I hope I didn’t do anything embarrassing!”

  “Sarah fucked some dude in her car,” Heather said in response, sounding jealous. “And I think she stole my Gene Loves Jezebel tape.”

  Had my power grab somehow not been witnessed by the teeming masses at the party? If they’d seen it, they hadn’t told Heather yet.

  That’s when I saw him. Again. He walked into the restaurant with a group of friends and got in line. He was in his trench coat again, looking even more handsome by daylight.

  “Wasn’t that guy at the party?” Heather said, pointing her head in his direction and sipping on her Frosty.

  “Uh, I don’t know. Was he?” I tried to stick a french fry in my mouth and succeeded only in brushing it against my cheek.

  “Yeah, he totally was,” Heather continued. “I remember seeing him out front. He’s cute.”

  Trench coat guy and his group walked toward us carrying their trays and looking for a table to sit at. He saw us and locked eyes with me. A spark of recognition.

  “Shit,” I couldn’t stop myself from saying.

  “What?”

  The group sat down at a table near us. I couldn’t look. I could see his face out of the corner of my eye. I nervously flashed my baby blues in his direction for a fraction of a second, but he was talking to a friend and eating, not paying me any mind.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just, I think I do remember talking to that dude. He had pot.”

  “Speaking of,” Heather said, “guess what I’ve got in my glove compartment.”

  “Isn’t that kind of risky?” I asked.

  “Eh, it’s just a roach, and it’ll be gone soon enough. Like, before our next class. Let’s go.”

  We stood and walked past the trench coat guy’s table. He glanced up at me with a blank face and stared for just long enough to communicate that he remembered, then quickly darted his eyes away. I wanted to jump in his lap and cover him with kisses for not telling anyone about me grabbing his jock at the party, but that would have been counterproductive, to say the least. Heather and I emptied our trays into the trash and left.

  I went to work that afternoon wearing my new favorite vest, one of Laurie’s that I’d found on top of the washing machine. I was finally recovering from the trauma of the weekend and feeling like maybe I wouldn’t have to go into hiding after all. So why not wear a black velvet vest over my new pristine white tuxedo shirt and augment it with my diabetes necklace hanging like a talisman around my neck? It’s called living out loud.

  I was looking forward to exchanging meaningful glances with Josh, my favorite awkwardly alluring Jew at the pharmacy counter. It was time to go back to harmless flirting. Enough of being so drunk and grabby.

  I walked into the store, clocked in, and took my position behind the front register, replacing Joy the day cashier. Once she left and the coast was clear, I visited the candy bar shelf a few steps away and brazenly swiped a 3 Musketeers bar, because whipped chocolate.

  Looking up at the pharmacy counter, I saw Josh talking with Ron the store manager. It appeared to be a serious conversation. What on earth about?

  A line started forming at my register, so I dutifully rang up folks for their cigarettes, hair clips, Cheetos, greeting cards, romance novels, baby oil, condoms, Dark and Lovely hair products, and panty hose.

  Then the cops came. Two robust-looking gentlemen made a beeline for the back counter. I kept intermittently looking back at the pharmacy while ringing folks up, watching as the cops spoke to Ron and looked solemnly at Josh.

  “He’s apparently been stealing pills from the pharmacy and selling them as a kind of side business,” Agnes the cosmetics lady whispered, having sidled up beside me behind the register. “And he looked like such a nice boy.”

  Indeed. The kind of boy you would take home to Mother after jerking him off in his station wagon. I walked in front of the register so I could turn and look at the mirror that ran across the entire front of the store just below the ceiling as a theft deterrent. I saw Josh being led by the uniformed butch brigade up toward the front, in handcuffs. Rushing back to my register, I turned around in time to see Josh and the officers rounding the corner toward me and heading toward the exit. Josh looked at me and flashed an embarrassed grin.

  Wow. Josh had done something dishonest and, even sexier, illegal. Not to mention entrepreneurial. And now he’d been caught. He’d thought he was getting away with it, but now here he was, being led away like a common criminal, his crooked clip-on tie clinging precariously to his collar. That fresh nerdy face and luxurious frizzy hair would never survive for long in the slammer. It was depressing, watching him humiliated like this. Had he really been hurting anyone? Probably, but with their consent, surely.

  I walked out to the automatic door to watch him being put in the back of the police car. Returning to my register, I looked down at the 3 Musketeers bar on the counter, picked it up, and returned it to the shelf.

  In conclusion, I found out later that night when I came home from work that it wasn’t my sister’s black velvet vest I’d been wearing. It was my mom’s.

  The oily young boy with the short hair and the curly bangs swirling over his forehead like an out-of-control plane spiraling toward earth has been browsing at the Tracks record store for what seems like years, looking to fill in the gaps in his tape collection. Is it gonna be some Siouxsie and the Banshees? Through the Looking Glass or Join Hands? The Peel Sessions or Once Upon a Time: The Singles? Or hey, maybe he wants some Joy Division, Depeche Mode, Kraft
werk, or some other Teutonic nonsense?

  Make your decision, young man. Because hear this, your blood sugar is ready to dip like raw vegetables on a party tray. And everyone knows that the likelihood of you making a good decision under that circumstance is on par with the likelihood that you will not embarrass your parents the next time they have friends over from church. You don’t want to walk out of this store with a cassette you will regret, like Wang Chung or T’Pau. It’s the late eighties, after all, and the line between delightfully tacky and god-awful is fine indeed.

  Finally, FINALLY, he catches a glimpse of himself in a glass partition and discovers that he’s sweaty and stupid, and realizes that maybe that is why he’s having trouble deciding. He resolves at that moment that he can only spend a few more minutes choosing which cassette to buy before heading over to the Fast Fare to buy some sweets. After another half hour of useless internal deliberation and endless walking of the pop/rock aisles, he closes his eyes, clicks his heels together three times, and pulls one cassette out from the others he’s gathered. Hurrah, it’s Burning from the Inside by Bauhaus, time to go. He hobbles over to the cashier and prepares to pony up his hard-earned $8.99.

  At first he attempts to pay with his driver’s license. The cashier—a charming young lady with an earring in her nose and hair the color of vomit—indicates with a cold stare that Tracks does not accept that form of payment. He then starts just pulling things out of his wallet that could possibly be mistaken for legal tender by, say, a newborn baby: a torn piece of paper with a phone number on it; a Red Cross CPR certification; a small collection of wallet-sized school portraits he was given by classmates, all stuck together. But none of these are satisfactory to the cashier, who just keeps narrowing her eyes, repeating the amount he owes, and pointing to the amount helpfully displayed on the register screen.

  Suddenly the boy’s face brightens as his instincts kick in and he realizes that what he needs to give the nice lady is money. Cash money. Not photo IDs or paper clips, but American dollars. He pulls a twenty out of his wallet and hands it to her with the magnanimity of Daddy Warbucks serving slop at a soup kitchen. So generous of him, to offer the woman money for a product/service she’s providing.

  He stumbles to his car with his new purchase, trying in vain to get the wrapping off the cassette so he can listen to it immediately and make sure he made the right choice. He quickly gives up and tosses the Tracks bag on the passenger seat of the 1977 Plymouth Volare that he inherited from his grandfather. It’s a huge, four-door vehicle that comfortably seats six, uncomfortably seats about twenty, and would easily survive a nuclear holocaust or any type of run-in with another vehicle. So, in short, a great car for dangerous diabetics in distress and a terrible car for everyone else.

  He takes his keys out of his pocket and looks at them intently, studying every ridge and slit of each key. One of these makes the car go vroom vroom, he probably thinks. Locating the right one, he sticks it into the ignition, starts the car, and pulls out of the parking space like a cat pulls out of a full bathtub it’s just been thrown into. He just has to get to the Fast Fare across the street. Across the very busy street.

  He sticks the nose of his Plymouth out into traffic, the better for passengers in oncoming vehicles to see how they will meet their deaths. He needs to turn right and then immediately get in the left-hand-turn lane so he can swerve on into the Fast Fare parking lot. He pulls out onto Six Forks Road and lumbers across the street to the convenience store as horns honk and expletives fly. Panicked drivers swerve gracefully around the Plymouth and magically avoid piling up on each other in an orgy of death. Our hero makes it across without so much as a scratch and parks the car, naturally, in the handicapped space, diagonally, because fuck it.

  He enters the shop and once again gets sucked into a Black Hole of Impossible Choices. Twenty minutes later he’s still looking over the selection with an extremely Libran indecisiveness. He’s now pacing back and forth, up to the Twizzlers, Gobstoppers, and SweeTarts, and back down again to the Reese’s Pieces, Kit Kats, Milky Ways, and 5th Avenues. What will he choose? Candy or chocolate? Nuts or nougat? Why not both?

  It’s very exciting, like watching two turtles play table tennis.

  Uh-oh, something has caught his eye. He’s moving, mesmerized, to the end cap, where the cheap candy hangs from pegs, packaged in clear plastic bags stapled closed by a label that says CANDY CORN, BUTTERSCOTCH, CIRCUS PEANUTS, or GUMDROPS. He walks straight up to the selection and pulls two bags of giant orange gumdrops in the shape of orange slices off their pegs.

  Legs tingling from the adrenaline surging through his bloodstream in order to keep him standing upright, he pivots to the poor cashier, who is now tasked with executing a transaction with the equivalent of a somnambulant circus monkey. But just when you think he’s ready to wrap this safari up, he decides he should probably get reinforcements just in case the two bags of orange corn-syrup-infused sugar blasts aren’t enough to bring his blood sugar up to normal human levels and beyond. He tramps back to the candy aisle, walking as if trudging through a dense thicket of rosebushes, and picks up a Mars bar, a Whatchamacallit, a Butterfinger, and two Almond Joys. With any luck he’ll get some of this stuff into his mouth before toppling face-first onto the floor and giving the poor lady behind the register one more spill to clean up. All the young man has to do now is pay.

  He pulls out of his pocket a crumpled-up gum wrapper and places it on the counter.

  Ugh. We’re going to be here for a few more minutes.

  CHAPTER 5

  “My little sister would totally go out with you,” a classmate of mine, Ashley, told me at lunch in the cafeteria one day. “She thinks you’re cute and thinks the whole diabetic thing is…intriguing.”

  Hmm. I doubted that sentence had ever been uttered before in the history of time.

  “Because she thinks she’s diabetic, too. She’s always having low blood sugar spells when she doesn’t eat.”

  “Hmm, well that’s probably hypoglycemia, not diabetes,” I explained. “She probably just has an overactive pancreas, or maybe her metabolism is—”

  “Anyway, you should ask her out.”

  Oh, OK, I was done talking. And yes, I supposed I should consider asking Ashley’s freshman sister out. I sure didn’t have girls banging down my door, and definitely none for whom my status as a diabetic was part of the allure. Since Dawn had pulled that comfortably platonic rug out from under me, I hadn’t thought much about trying to get a date. Perhaps I needed to get out there and find some poor unsuspecting young lady to take me as her secretly gay boyfriend. Get back up on that horse that I was so terrible at riding. Sure, on the inside I was a pulsating maelstrom of homo terror, but there was no way in hell that I was anywhere close to being ready to declare that openly. I was barely ready to declare my love for hair mousse openly, and I wore that every day. The experience of doing something so reckless in public at the PJ party had shocked me to my core, and I was ready to run for the hills of heteronormativity, however inaccessible the entrance, across the deep river of denial. And I needed a girl to be my raft. Or something.

  And hey, maybe there was a nice girl out there who could turn me around? And maybe that girl was a diabetic enthusiast with a sister who was in my algebra class?

  In any case, I’d recently drawn a dramatic line in the sand, one demarcating the division between myself and terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad gayness. I’d jumped across it and sworn to God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit that I would not ever ever ever cross back again. After a final bout of self-pleasuring while alone in the house one Saturday, I took the magazines I’d stolen from newsagents and hidden under a rug in my closet—Honcho, Bolt, and Torso—and ceremoniously burned them in my tin Charlie Brown trash can.

  I tossed the magazines in the can one by one. When it landed, the Bolt issue opened to a photo spread of about eight dudes playing “Whose Pickle Is This?” I lit a match and ignited the corner of the mag, its glossy pages only
too willing to give themselves over to the flames (they’d been burning hot for so long). I died a little inside as the sweaty orgy scene before me darkened and curled into ashy nothingness before my eyes.

  I did keep one tawdry publication: the International Male catalog. In case I found myself in need of a pirate blouse or gauze overalls.

  Ashley’s sister Dani, a fourteen-year-old freshman, was a hot little number. Even I knew that. She had legs that went up to here, long brownish-blonde hair, a full set of strong teeth, and a confident swagger. I called her one afternoon after getting assurance from Ashley that Dani would indeed be home and would indeed say yes if I asked her out.

  “How’s it going?” I asked nervously.

  “Oh, fine, you know, pretty good.”

  “I got your number from Ashley. I hope you don’t mind that I’m calling.”

  “Oh, no, it’s cool. She, you know, uh…”

  “So, I was wondering if you wanted to maybe I don’t know go out or something like to get some food or you know whatever I don’t know.”

  “Sure, that sounds awesome.”

  We made a date for Friday night, and I hung up as quickly as possible because who wants to just sit there and talk on the phone to the girl you’ve just asked out? Not me.

  Immediately after getting off the phone, I entered the planning stages of the date, a stage that no real heterosexual teenage boy has ever embarked upon in the history of the world. Any other lover of the ladies worth his raging libido would probably not plan a date several days in advance and, worse, decide upon taking her to Darryl’s because it’s classy. No, that boy would probably just take his girl out for a quick ice cream so they could hurry up and get down to the proper point of a date: humping feverishly in the back of his car. I was clearly a different breed of boy, an old-fashioned type with a powerful respect for women, an abiding interest in their wants and needs, and a willingness to hear all about them while sharing a titanic plate of Darryl’s Signature Loaded Smashed Potatoes.