Sweet Tooth

by Tim Anderson

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Aaaaaaaand,” Karen assisted, “he’s apparently a really cool guy, and he thinks you’re cute.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Soooooooo let’s all go for drinks!”

  “Mmmm, I don’t know.”

  “Oh, yes you do,” Karen insisted.

  “No, I really don’t.”

  “You do.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Do.”

  “Yes!” Kelly jumped ahead. “So this week sometime?”

  I reluctantly agreed to go out and humor my friends. I also was, I must admit, a little fascinated to see how hilariously incompatible this “really cool guy” and I were. He’d probably show up carrying a baton and wearing a leotard, a tuxedo shirt, and an eye patch. He would probably also refer to himself as “the barrister” and be ninety years old.

  We met at the Stingray, a hipster bar near downtown. I didn’t have any expectations whatsoever as I sat down with Kelly and Karen at a booth, with a beer in my hand and a chip on my shoulder.

  “There they are,” Kelly said. Two guys walked in, one a black gentleman in an Oxford shirt and cut-off shorts, the other a white young man in beige shorts and the most hideously, aggressively ugly Hawaiian shirt I’d ever been nearly blinded by.

  Kelly introduced me to Sean, her black friend, who then introduced me to Jimmy, his white friend in the hideous shirt. Jimmy and I shook hands.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” he said with a smile and a businesslike handshake as he sat down.

  “Nice to meet you and your shirt,” I said.

  “It’s pretty loud, huh?” Jimmy said.

  “Yeah, where did you get it?”

  “On the island of Oahu.”

  “Really?”

  “No. Thrift store.”

  Hmm. I wondered if Craig had bagged it up for him.

  Jimmy’s head was perfectly, adorably round. I’d never seen a rounder head in my life. In addition to tacky taste in shirts, he had a slight receding hairline and big balloon-like gummyworm lips. Lips like sugar. So far so good.

  Sean brought over drinks for him and Jimmy, and we all clinked glasses. Sean and Kelly then started talking about how hot it was outside, trying to come up with the most apt description as Jimmy stared off into space.

  “Hot enough to fry an egg on my thigh,” Kelly suggested.

  “Hotter than a popcorn fart,” Sean said.

  “Useless as tits on a bullfrog,” Jimmy said absently. Sean and Kelly looked at him askance. “We’re doing similes, right?” he asked. I liked him. He kept up with things.

  I saw Dani walk in with her boyfriend, and strolled over to the bar to talk to them for a minute, keeping an eye on Jimmy and his shirt.

  “I’m being set up with a rogue Hawaiian,” I told her.

  “Wow, that shirt is awesome,” she said. “And by awesome I mean revolting. Is he nice?”

  “Yeah, he’s kind of funny.”

  “Funny’s good. Better than dumb as a brick. He’s not dumb as a brick, is he?”

  “Oh, no. He knows the word simile.”

  “Sounds perfect for you.”

  After a while I went back over to the table. Jimmy, squished into the booth and against the wall by Sean and another of Sean’s friends, was still talking to Sean and Kelly. I looked at Karen, who was sitting there talking to no one, and doing it beautifully.

  “Karen, you wanna play Ms. Pac-Man?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “I gotta warn you,” I said. “I’m really good.”

  I escorted her to the machine over at the end of the bar, put two quarters in, and gestured for her to play first, because of chivalry.

  She started moving her little ladies in a herky-jerky fashion across the screen, and boy, did she suck. Karen, I thought. Have you never used a joystick before? It shouldn’t look that fraught.

  Her first player got killed off quickly, and soon it was my turn. She stood aside, and I slid in front of the screen.

  “Let the game begin,” I said, overconfidently. I began my round and lost my first player within a few seconds because I fumbled the joystick like a chump.

  “Majestic,” Karen said, displacing me from the player position. “Like a kid in a Burger King hat.”

  Karen’s next round was better, and it seemed to go on for days. I found myself openly cheering for the multicolored ghosts.

  “Come on, Pinky, step it up! Jesus, Blinky, what’s your problem?”

  Finally, finally Inky ate Karen’s next player, and I got to slide back over and set about redeeming myself. I gripped the joystick and prepared for battle.

  “Da na na na na na nana nana na na nana nana nana nana na na na!” said the computer music, as the next round began. I improved my performance this time, swallowing power pellets and energizers and transmogrified ghosts and fruit bonuses like a master of the universe. Then I choked and died, and Karen stepped to the helm once again. When her last player finally succumbed to Inky in Level 3, it was clear that victory was within my grasp. I could win this. I really should win this.

  I furiously steered my ravenous Mses hither and yon through the labyrinth because I was not going to lose this video game featuring a strong female lead to a freaking girl. Oh, shit, there was Pinky, closing in on me. Gotta turn the corner quick and slip into the passageway to the other side of the screen. Here it comes! Here it comes!

  “Hey, what are you doing?” a soft voice said to me back in the real, noncomputerized world. I looked over, and it was Jimmy in his terrible shirt, leaning against the machine and smiling widely with his head tilted.

  “Uh, playing Ms. Pac-Man?” I said, jerking the joystick so as to smack dead into Blinky and die like a little bitch. “Dammit!”

  Karen was the victor. And boy, did she know how to gloat. “I’ll be expecting a nice expensive drink from the bar to find its way to me sometime very soon,” she said with a twinkle in her eye as she waltzed away a sore winner, leaving Jimmy and me alone.

  Still reeling from my fatal encounter with Blinky, I suggested we get some drinks. We squeezed our way through throngs of hipster breeders to get the bartender’s attention. After she finished yelling at some Germans who didn’t tip her, she presented us with our requested beverages. I dropped off a cosmo at the table where Karen was sitting, and Jimmy and I went to another table alone. He got out a cigarette and lit it up.

  “So are you from Raleigh?” I probed.

  “I was born here, but I grew up all over. Army brat.”

  We soon discovered that we were born in the same hospital one month apart, that we had been at the same Sugarcubes concert back in ’89, and that it’s possible we were unwittingly dancing to the same hilariously bleak Nine Inch Nails ditties at the Fallout Shelter back in the day. He started talking at length about his love of Philip Glass and Michael Nyman, which made me wonder if I was highfalutin enough for this conversation. Minimalist composers, huh? OK, I’ll see your artsy film-scoring types and raise you a Nova Scotia fiddler.

  “You know who I’m really into right now? I just got an album by a Canadian fiddle player named Ashley MacIsaac. He’s wily and gay!”

  Jimmy nodded vaguely.

  “He was just on Conan O’Brien and he performed in a kilt and he did a high kick at the end and he wasn’t wearing any underwear. It was fantastic!”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy said, taking a long tug on his cigarette as he seriously considered the most diplomatic way possible to verbalize what he was thinking. “I really hate him.”

  “You…hate him? Wait. You know who he is? And you hate him?”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy said, exhaling two lungs full of smoke. “I read an article where he was saying he was just gay for now.”

  “Nooooo.”

  “Yeah, he said when he gets married he won’t be doing any more gay shit.”

  “That sounds wrong.”

  “No, I read it.”

  In the next few years I would learn that every single as
sertion Jimmy has made about a third party should be subject to the strictest of scrutiny. He has a tendency to jump to the most unflattering conclusions about everyone based upon the slightest of circumstantial evidence or thirdhand knowledge. But my natural tendency had always been to assume everyone else was better informed than I was, so I accepted Jimmy’s story at face value and changed the subject.

  “Hmm,” I said, “OK, well, how about Madonna?”

  We agreed that Madonna was like a sometimes awesome, often embarrassing older sister. Though I’d cooled on her when she started talking smack about my secret stepsister Sinéad O’Connor, you just can’t stay mad at Madonna.

  “So,” I said, “should we go out or something?”

  Jimmy looked down at the table and replied with an adamant “Yeah, sure, I guess so.”

  The next night I picked him up at Eckerd Pharmacy on Hillsborough Street, where he was the photo lab manager. He asked if I could follow him in his car, named Chantel, to his apartment just down the road so he could drop her off in the parking lot. I trailed behind him down to the Wilmont Apartments building. “I’m One, Too,” a sticker on Chantel’s rear end proclaimed. I smiled at his taste in bumper verbiage.

  We went to dinner at The Rockford downtown, and I taught him how not to piss off a waitress by grossly undertipping, asking for separate checks, or requesting something that’s not on the menu. He taught me how to talk about something you are obviously passionate about—the films of Peter Greenaway, for example, or the music of Momus (who?)—while exhibiting the look of someone who couldn’t care less about what he’s currently talking about. His normal expression was a long (yet perfectly round) slack face, complete with big sad puppy-dog eyes and lips that seemed to inflate when he was just sitting and thinking. His mopey expression, coupled with his completely monotone, sleepy-robot delivery, made him hard to read. If he said something like, say, “Log Cabin Republicans make me want to jump off a bridge,” you’d be hard pressed to tell whether or not he was kidding. He just sounded sad. But then, in the same tone of voice, he’d say something like “That Grace Jones album cover reminds me of my mother because Mom also has five mouths,” and you’d realize he’s probably fine.

  We moved on from the restaurant to the record store, because we all know there’s no better way to get to know a boy than to see what albums he picks out and considers purchasing.

  In Jimmy’s case, these albums were the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange and something by some Eurotrash singer named Mylène Farmer. I nodded approvingly at these choices, even though I had no idea who this Ms. Farmer character was.

  “She’s basically the French Mariah Carey,” he said. I didn’t like that answer. “I mean, she’s popular like Mariah Carey,” he clarified. “Her music is more like tacky Eurovision goth. She does concerts with huge mechanical tarantulas.”

  Acceptable!

  After the record store I felt I should propose something romantic, since we were on a date. So off to the Rose Garden we went. It was on the grounds of Raleigh Little Theatre, where my mom had portrayed Mary Poppins years before, and where I’d played everyone from a Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz to the baby brother Michael who always dragged his teddy bear around with him in Peter Pan. It was also where we all used to go drink and smoke weed when we were in high school, so, all in all, it had a happy history.

  We sat down at a picnic table in the darkness and gazed out at the dramatic labyrinthine hedges.

  “So where’s your family?” I asked.

  “My sister’s here in Raleigh. Dad’s in Iowa with my stepmom. Brother’s in Florida, I think?”

  “And your mom?”

  “Oh, I don’t know where she is. Last I heard she was on her fourth husband and living in Asheville.”

  Ooooh, we’ve got a story here. Time to ask some tough questions.

  “When’s the last time you talked to her?”

  “’Bout five years ago. I was desperate for money and had to beg her for some.”

  In the next few minutes I mined a mother lode of inside info on this terrible woman. Among other things, she’d sent him to a mental hospital after he came out of the closet at fifteen, and then forced him, when he returned home, to use separate cutlery, plates, and glasses so that he didn’t give her AIDS.

  “Wow,” I said, suddenly newly re-impressed with how sane and loving my own mother was. “Your momma sounds like a gorgon.”

  “Yeah,” he mumbled. “She is.”

  A silence engulfed the Rose Garden as all the romance was sucked out of the atmosphere by my insistence on talking about Jimmy’s mother. Even the rosebushes seemed to be twisting up their faces at me in the darkness as if to say, “Jesus, can you just talk about trip hop or something?”

  Jimmy sighed and looked at the sky. “You want to come back to my place and listen to the CDs I bou—”

  “Sure, let’s go!”

  We set off back to the fourth floor of the Wilmont Apartments, where Jimmy, after quietly urging his roommate Bill to please stay in his room, proceeded to get me high and ply me with beer. His game of seduction was simple: He put on the Mylène Farmer album, sat on the couch next to me, and brought out a vulgar art book done by artist Jeff Koons that had been tucked away under the coffee table. It had Mr. Koons on the cover holding a baby piglet, flanked by a full-grown pig. Inside, the artist was photographed getting up to all sorts of nude mischief with his loose blonde wife. It was quite disgusting/titillating, and so very pink. Then he brought out a prized possession from the same stack under the coffee table, and my head nearly exploded: the French edition of Madonna’s Sex book.

  Although there was a regrettably large number of photos featuring lesbian muff diving, one thing we’d both already agreed on about Madonna was that she knew how to surround herself with good-looking men, and, if this book was anything to go on, she often found herself naked and splayed with a bunch of them at once. Best of all, the text was all in French, so there were no pesky readable words getting in the way of all the smut. After getting through the section where Vanilla Ice and a platinum-blonde Madonna get down to it, I closed the book. The Mylène Farmer album was still on the stereo, the singer cooing out a bunch of breathless, wispy, and tuneless French because she obviously couldn’t sing for shit.

  “This album is terrible,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Jimmy agreed. We kissed, rolled around on the floor, fumbled for each other’s belts, and eventually took it into the bedroom, where we shed our clothes and enacted scenes from our favorite Fassbinder films as images of the past hour—of Jeff Koons’s junk, of Vanilla Ice’s butt, of Madonna hitchhiking while naked and smoking—danced in our heads.

  Oh, lookee here, he’s lost control again. He and his longtime male companion of three days, the mysterious, pillow-lipped James, were sleeping peacefully in James’s wooden, poorly constructed bed, when all of a sudden the twitching started. James’s head popped up, and now he’s looking through the darkness and seeing our boy’s profile doing a frenetic jig on the pillow. Ooh, and there goes his shoulder jerking up and sending his arm flapping. James hops out of the bed and goes around to turn on the light. His eyes widen. Then they narrow. Then they register remembrance that the wet, rather desperate-looking naked man jiggling on the bed is a diabetic.

  Oh, shit, he thinks, realizing that he never actually asked his diabetic sex partner what to do in the event of some sort of after-hours diabetic emergency, like, for example, whatever is happening now. Then he remembers that his roommate Bill’s boyfriend has the same dreaded disease.

  “Bill!” James whisper-screams as he opens Bill’s door and flips on the light. “Bill!”

  “How may I help you?” Bill, the consummate customer service professional, says in response, his eyes still closed, his head still resting on his soft, silky pillow.

  “I think Tim’s having a diabetic…thing. He’s shaking and sweating and jerking around.”

  “He needs sugar,” Bill says sagely, eyes still close
d, head still resting. “Get him sugar. Pour it into his mouth.”

  Of course, how is James to know that Bill means the word “sugar” in the broad sense—i.e., something with sugar in it, such as orange juice or honey or ice cream or Duncan Hines buttercream frosting? James, naïf that he is, takes Bill’s instruction at face value, so he beelines it to the kitchen, pulls out a big bag of Imperial Sugar, and rushes it back to the bedroom, where His Twitchiness is holding court.

  “Tim. Tim!” he says. “Eat this.” He opens the bag, forms a spout with the edge, holds his head still with one hand, and starts pouring. Just stone cold pouring sugar into the poor boy’s gaping maw.

  We all know what happens next. The bed turns into an elegant Xanadu of glittery sugar crystals as our hero becomes agitated at being held down and asserts his independence from the sugar monster trying to rape his mouth. He flails his hands around, sending the white stuff flying all over the bed, the floor, his hair, his eyes, and, most unforgivably, all over his cat Stella, who was watching the proceedings at the edge of the bed and now looks royally pissed as she hops off the bed and goes into the other room to get away from this bullshit.

  James is undeterred. “I am not,” he says to himself, “letting another naked man die in my bed.” He then laughs because that was a funny joke, and he’s always laughing when he should be concentrating on the shit-show in front of him. He again holds down the alien boy from planet Spasm and pours more sugar into his mouth, setting off another glitter storm when the hands once again, this time in slow motion, Matrix-style, send sugar flying. James keeps a solid grip on the bag and waits for the flailing to temporarily abate, then forces the spout back into the young man’s face. The boy moves his head away and locks his jaw shut. Nothing, it appears, is getting into that mouth anytime soon. Poor James.

  The boy continues to shake his moneymaker on the bed as James leans against the wall wondering what to do next. Releasing an epic sigh, he heads into the living room and picks up the phone.

  “Hi, yeah, I need an ambulance at the Wilmont Apartments on Hillsborough Street. Diabetes attack. Yeah. He’s in the bed, shaking. I gave him some sugar, but he’s not letting me give him any more, for some reason. 3200. A8. Thanks.”