Sweet Tooth

by Tim Anderson

  “Can I help you?” I said, knowing that in just a few short moments I would be able to tell them we were out of whatever they wanted.

  “What you want, babe?” the man said to his ball and chain, and she sighed.

  “What’s the soup of the day?” she whined at me without looking up from the menu.

  “We’re out of soup.” Always felt good to say that. And we were out of soup. I’d eaten the rest of it. It was cheesy potato, and it was good.

  She huffed and puffed a few times.

  “I’ll just get some cheese straws.”

  I looked over at the cheese straw tray and saw that there were only two more of the tiny little things.

  “Sure,” I said, placing them on a plate and setting the plate in front of her. It was a pitiful-looking lunch.

  I thought about the black butt staring up from the pages of the Voice. It had put me in a good mood, and before I knew it, I took a blind stab at being customer service-oriented as a curl once again bounced in front of my face, poking me in the eyeball.

  “You know what I would recommend?” I said, hooking the curl back around my ear.

  Both of them looked at me, suspicious of my uncharacteristic helpfulness.

  “The avocados,” I answered. “They’re really delicious today. And I make a mean avocado jack.”

  The young man is not very good with a broom. At least not at the moment. He’s been at it for almost an hour, and he’s only covered about a third of the shop. It’s five thirty, and on a normal Saturday he would be ready to lock up by now, but there he stands with the broom, just sweeping and stepping and stooping and sweeping and stepping and stooping and sweating and wiping his clammy brow and sweeping and stopping and stooping and sweating and stopping and looking around and staring into space and then doing some more sweeping and stooping.

  In the back of the shop his friend and coworker Mandy, the dishwasher, is being a responsible little worker bee, spraying down the sinks one last time before gathering her things and going outside for a cigarette.

  She passes by her stooping, sweeping, and sweating friend and gives him a heads-up that she’s going out for a cigarette. He emits a sound by way of saying “OK,” but through his unmoving lips it sounds more like “mm-guh.”

  Mandy generally notices things, which is more than can be said for her friend today, because he’s been in that one spot for a while now and really should just move on to, say, that one table in the corner where it appears a banana nut muffin has blown itself up.

  “You OK, Tim?” she asks, tilting her head quizzically.

  “Yeah, ’m gay,” he responds, which is what he always says when he’s losing touch with reality, though usually with better pronunciation.

  Mandy looks at him closely. “Just tired?”

  “Myeh,” he says.

  “OK, I’ll be outside giving myself cancer.”

  “Ngrate. Seesoon.”

  Mandy leaves, and the young man goes back to sweeping. After a few seconds he rests his woozy head on his hands, which now sit atop the broom handle. He starts swaying a little bit, back and forth, back and forth, then whoops! The broom falls to the floor and he stumbles forward, but regains his footing pretty well, like a drunk gymnast doing a sloppy floor routine. He surveys the grounds and determines that, the banana nut explosion notwithstanding, things look pretty good and he’s tired and fuck it.

  He trudges back to drop the broom off in the back—and by “drop off” we really mean “drop”—and then grabs his book, his Village Voice, and his keys, and trundles up to the front door. He somehow successfully opens the door, walks through the threshold, and sits down at the cement table where Mandy is lighting up. He immediately opens up the Voice to the Life in Hell comic and lays his wet head down on it.

  Mandy takes a drag of her cigarette and looks at him.

  “Tim?” He looks tired, or exasperated, or both, she thinks. And she couldn’t really blame him: It was a brutal lunch crowd today, and it was staggered so the people just kept trickling in, minute after minute, hour after hour, making it hard for her and Tim to do the quality snacking that they usually like to get done. Then an idea hits her, and she nudges the boy’s shoulder with her hand.

  “Tim?” No answer from him.

  “Tim?” She leans in, and all of a sudden he lifts a fist and slams it down on the table.

  That was unexpected, she thinks. “Tim,” she says, “what’s wrong? Tell me.”

  Without lifting his head he emits a frustrated series of cries. Mandy’s eyes widen as he finally lifts his head and she sees that there are no actual tears coming out of his eyes. There’s just a scrunched-up red face looking agonized and lost. Well, more lost than normal.

  It looks as if Mandy now sees the writing on the wall, and the writing says, “Tim has lost his mind, and I think it’s because of the diabetes.” As the spastic boychild pounds his fist on the table faster and harder and faster and harder and starts roaring like a girlie little lion, she stubs out her cigarette, hurries into the shop, and scuttles to the phone in the back.

  She calls the boy’s mother first.

  “Hi, Mrs. Anderson? Hi, it’s Mandy. Listen, I’m at the Coterie with Tim, and I think he might be having a low blood sugar?”

  “OH NO!”

  “Yeah, um, he’s at the table outside, and he’s really acting strange.”

  “OH, GOSH, MANDY, YOU HAVE TO GET HIM SOME JUICE! ORANGE JUICE! HE NEEDS ORANGE JUICE!”

  Now, Mandy has talked to the boy’s mother many times, and she knows that when the woman seems to be screaming she’s often just talking in her normal tone of voice. Mandy very calmly holds the phone a foot away from her ear and continues listening to what the woman has to say, which is

  “OK, HANG UP, I’M GOING TO CALL 911!”

  Mandy puts the phone down and goes over to the fridge to get some orange juice. She fills a glass and hurries outside to give it to the patient.

  “Tim, you need to drink this. Do you need me to help you?”

  The boy lifts his head, looks at the juice she’s placed on the table, and says, “Nah.” Then he lowers his head back to the table.

  The phone rings in the shop, and Mandy scurries in to pick it up. Knowing who it probably is, she once again holds the phone a country mile from her ear and listens in as the boy’s mother talks at her.

  “HOW IS HE? MANDY, HOW IS HE? IS HE CONSCIOUS? IS HE TALKING?”

  “I just gave him some orange juice, and…”—Mandy looks out the front window and sees the boy sitting and looking at the glass of orange juice as if it’s a zebra at the zoo—“…he’s drinking it right now.”

  “WELL, I’VE CALLED 911, AND THEY’RE ON THEIR WAY! YOU SHOULD GRAB SOME COOKIES AND TAKE THEM OUT TO HIM!”

  “OK, Mrs. Anderson, I’m going to hang up now and go check on him, OK?”

  “ON MY WAY OVER! I’LL BE THERE SOON!!!”

  Mandy hangs up and goes back into the cooler to retrieve a big deluxe chocolate chip cookie. She hurries back out to the table, and as she approaches the door she stops in her tracks, seeing that the boy is no longer sitting dumbly at the table. There sits the glass of orange juice, untouched.

  “Tim? Tim?” She walks out into the parking lot, searching left, right, and center for the young idiot. Finally she finds him slumped in the passenger seat of his fantastically unattractive car. She hears the familiar sound of him rifling through his plastic bag full of cassette tapes, which he’s always doing in order to track down the one cassette he desperately needs to find. (This cassette is always at the bottom of the bag.)

  “Tim?” she says as she approaches the car. She winds around to the passenger side only to see an open door, an empty seat, and no bag of cassettes. She turns around and sees the boy loping across the parking lot, zigzagging his way back to the storefront, clutching his plastic bag of cassettes in a Mongolian death grip.

  Mandy walks toward him as the ambulance arrives. She waves it down and points to her frie
nd, who has just tripped on the curb and is in the process of falling over, scattering cassettes all over the sidewalk. Let’s see, what’s he got? Tears for Fears, OMD, New Order, Wire, Joy Division. Good Lord, who art-directed these album covers, the Stasi?

  Anyway, the paramedics get out of the ambulance and walk over to the insulin junkie, who is now sitting on the curb trying to gather his cassettes together and place them lovingly back in the grocery bag. His eyeballs linger for a few moments on The Glove’s Blue Sunshine, which, in his defense, does have an alluring cover.

  One of the paramedics sits down on the curb and tries to chat with him, but to no avail, because the boy is unable to communicate in any human language. He can only sing, which is what he proceeds to do, though the paramedic can certainly be forgiven for thinking that the young man is just dry-heaving.

  The paramedic helps the boy gather his cassettes into the bag and is finally able to sweet-talk him into the ambulance so they can work their para-magic on him. The inside of the ambulance is very bright, and the boy wishes he had some sunglasses, like those savage shades that Corey Hart wore in that video for that one song. Crazy kids and their MTV.

  Mandy pops her little head into the ambulance and asks if it’s OK if she talks to her friend.

  “Hey, Tim, how are you feeling? Are you OK? Do you remember what happened?”

  The young man bursts into tears, as if Mandy, instead of checking to make sure he was OK, had hurled his bag of cassettes onto the pavement, squatted over them, and taken a whiz.

  Mandy’s face falls, and she’s not sure what to do or how to feel, what with all the mysterious blubbering and the bright white lights of the ambulance and the fact that she can’t remember if she put her cigarette out and the fact that she’s never seen her friend in such a fugue state as this, even when he’s wasted on Boone’s Farm and quoting lines from The Golden Girls.

  The screeching of tires heralds the arrival of his mother. She slams to a halt next to the ambulance, then gets out of the car and starts screaming again at poor Mandy.

  “WHAT HAPPENED? WHY IS HE CRYING? CAN HE TALK? WHAT’S HIS BLOOD SUGAR?”

  Wow, this woman has some volume on her. Mandy opens her mouth to answer, and nothing comes out because which question should she answer, and what is the answer to that question?

  “He’s going to be fine,” says one of the medics sitting with the boy, with an admirably pleasant bedside manner. “His level was pretty low, but we’ve shot him full of glucagon, and he’ll be back to himself pretty soon.”

  “WHY IS HE CRYING?”

  “Oh, you know, when this happens, sometimes they get a little frustrated and emotional, because they can’t communicate what’s happening to them. It’s completely normal.”

  Hmm. Would’ve been great if the medic had just said, “BECAUSE HE’S POSSESSED!” but that also would have been mean to Mama, so whatever, at least it’s over now, and Mandy can finally enjoy a full cigarette.

  Oh, I see she’s lit one already.

  CHAPTER 7

  Coming out to your first friend—especially if she’s a nice young lady with no gaydar—is a monumental occasion, so you should definitely do it at a playground after dark, just the two of you. That way it’s not in any way weird or awkward.

  I had graduated from high school, and in a few short months I would be leaving Raleigh for Greensboro, where I would attend Guilford College and, hopefully, allow myself to be seduced by every male professor in the Classics Department, assuming it had one. (I hadn’t checked.) Once I left Raleigh I was planning on kicking down those closet doors with my gay cowboy boots (with the fringe) and venture out into the wild and hopefully very blue yonder. But before I put myself out there like that, I had to take that first step and tell my best friend Dani that she was, unbeknownst to her, a big old fag hag. I couldn’t leave Raleigh without having at least opened the closet doors a crack.

  It was the summer that Bret Michaels, the lead singer of hair metal band Poison, declared to the world that he was diabetic, an announcement that was greeted with a collective “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” joke. I came home one day to see him staring at me from the cover of my Diabetes Forecast magazine, striking a shirtless pose and wearing his trusty headband as well as a lusty expression that seemed to be saying “Talk dirty to me” or “I want action” or “Unskinny bop” or whatever. I gasped when I first saw the headline—“Bret Michaels Comes Out of the Closet.” For a few short seconds there was real excitement that a popular rock star, even one as vulgar as Bret Michaels, was playing for my team, sexually. But I quickly realized what closet they were referring to. This wasn’t Homosexual Forecast magazine, after all. The closet he was barging out of was the diabetic one. Wait, there’s a diabetic closet?

  “Argh,” I’m sure I said to myself when I read the text under the headline: “ ‘Singer talks about his life as a Type 1 diabetic.’ Oh God, so what/who cares?” Sure, OK, it was nice to have a celebrity diabetic out there who was a little bit zeitgeistier than Mary Tyler Moore or Jean Smart, but honestly, what’s so tough about admitting publicly that you have an irritating and sometimes dangerous metabolic disease? No, no, no, what takes real bravery is admitting publicly that you have an irritating and downright disgusting moral disease.

  When I started considering the idea of maybe trying to possibly perhaps publicly declare tentatively the fact that I might could be gay, it was 1991 and there were no great gay role models to look to for encouragement, though I had my suspicions about Olympic diver Greg Louganis. Television wasn’t brimming with gay characters, unless you counted Jack Tripper from Three’s Company, which you shouldn’t, because that was just a plot device. I really had no idea what reaction I would get when I started telling people, but I assumed the worst because it seemed no one could stand the gays, from Jesse Helms to the Old Testament God to teenage boys to the hip-hop rappers on the MTV.

  In the fall of 1989 I went to see the Cowboy Junkies at the Rialto, an art house theater in Raleigh. At the time, the movie playing there was Harvey Fierstein’s now-classic Torch Song Trilogy, a film that featured drag queens and gay romance and lewd sign language and Matthew Broderick kissing a dude in a haystack. I had read all about the movie in the Voice and had been dying to see it, so for about twenty minutes at the beginning of the Junkies’ show it was my lucky day. When they took the stage that night, some cheeky little scamp who worked at the theater decided it would be fun to play the movie without sound as a comely backdrop to the band’s beautiful, heartbreaking ballads and singer Margo Timmins’s lovelorn, smoky soprano. This was somewhat inappropriate! As the band tenderly performed “Misguided Angel,” a lovely ballad of star-crossed romance, and Margo sipped on a glass of wine, the screen behind them erupted in an explosion of sequins, fake eyelashes, Easter bonnets, maracas, fright wigs, and oiled-up go-go boys wearing little more than tiny Valentine’s pillows in front of their jocks. It was an early scene in the movie, and it was captivating, to say the least, especially the go-go boys, whose bewitching mesmerism just about set my lap on fire.

  The rest of the crowd was not so enchanted. At first they didn’t know what to do with the spectacle, but I suppose since it was harmless drag queens prancing around nobody was really that up in arms. But a few scenes later the villagers got restless and demanding and capital-O offended. Harvey Fierstein’s character Arnold meets a blond gentleman named Ed at the gay bar after his drag show, and they make their way back to Arnold’s place to get it on. The men chat at the door of Arnold’s apartment as he fumbles for his keys, though of course we the audience couldn’t know what their muted voices were saying. (I wanted to know what their muted voices were saying.) They walk inside, and the camera shows their silhouettes against a window as their faces move closer and closer together.

  “Do it! Do it! Do it! Hurry!” I said to myself as I watched the screen, eyes bulging and every muscle in my body trembling with antici.....pation. The heads slowly converged, and finally they kissed, setting o
ff an agitated rumble through the audience. After the song, Margo said a polite “Thank you” and then asked good-naturedly, “Was that song funny?”

  “Turn it off!” a female voice screeched from the audience. A chorus of yelps all over the theater chirped agreement.

  “You want to get rid of the movie?” Margo asked to a resounding “yes” from the audience. A minute later the projector was turned off, leaving me in the dark with no drag queens, no go-go boys, and no hot man-on-man action. All I had was the band’s beautiful renditions of “Sweet Jane” and “Blue Moon Revisited” to soothe my agitated hormones. Which was fine for the time being, but eventually something’s gotta give, come on.

  So the question became: What would happen when I started broadcasting my own flashy gay movie to the masses of folks with great taste in music who just want to enjoy the band they came to watch? The answer, probably: a chorus of irritated people shrieking “Turn it off!”

  It was term paper season, fall 1990, and what better time to coyly explore how one might incorporate homosexuality into one’s official AP English studies? Our instructions were to choose from a list of movies that tackled a certain social or political issue, research the issue, and explore how the film depicts it. The list included Important Films like Lean on Me, A Passage to India, Platoon, Kramer vs. Kramer, Skokie, and, for some reason, Bonfire of the Vanities. It was all “plight of inner city kids,” or “colonialism,” or “Vietnam,” or “divorce,” or “racists wanting to march in a parade” or “the tragedy of awful movie adaptations starring Melanie Griffith”—but nowhere to be found was any movie tackling a topic that really spoke to me, like “gratuitous male nudity” or “bathhouses of ancient Greece.” There had to be something meaningful on this list that I could pour my jittery, starving sexuality fully into. Then, on the flyer our teacher handed out to us, I saw a TV-movie from a few years before that I remembered seeing previews for: An Early Frost, starring yummy Aidan Quinn as a gay man diagnosed with AIDS. Bingo.