Candyfreak

by Steve Almond

  The response was astonishing. For months, all anyone could talk about was Bubble Yum. The most popular girls in my junior high school carried packs in the back pockets of their jeans, which were so tight as to allow a view of the contours. (Thus to be seen packing.) Guys gave girls two-packs as the official seal of going-steadydom. The rich kids from Los Altos Hills would celebrate birthdays with entire boxes. Bubble Yum was de rigueur at dances, where close physical proximity to the opposite sex was an actual possibility. Oh, to be a teenage lover smuggling his boner onto the dance floor during “When the Lights Go Down in the City” without a piece to honey the breath!

  The Old Barrel couldn’t even keep Bubble Yum stocked because the manufacturer couldn’t keep the Old Barrel stocked. One had to journey further out into the retail market. And this led, of course, to the black market effect. Guys like Bobby Hankey—who, it was rumored, had blown up a kitten—stockpiled Bubble Yum, then resold the stuff at considerable markup near the lockers. (Bubble Yum dealers, dear, and right here in Palo Alto!)

  The mania reached such a pitch that an urban myth arose: Someone had found spider eggs in his Bubble Yum. I’m certain this was nonsense, just as I am relatively certain that Rod Stewart’s stomach was not really pumped as a result of the ingestion of … oh, do I really have to go there? But the rumor struck me as meaningful nonetheless—an expression of communal guilt over our own rabid greed, and perhaps also a way of connecting to the larger world, to the other towns beset by the same contagion. Not even the emergence of various pretenders, such as Hubba Bubba and Bubblicious, could diminish our passion.

  As dramatic as the Bubble Yum boom was, the Pop Rocks freak-out, a few years later, was ten times worse. Pop Rocks, for those who have never heard of them, are tiny fruit-flavored candies that come in the shape of finely ground gravel. They’re like any other hard candy—a boiled blend of sugar, corn syrup, flavor, and coloring—except for the secret ingredient: carbon dioxide gas compressed at 600 pounds per square inch. As the candy cools, the pressurized gas is released and shatters the candy. But there are still tiny bubbles of pressurized carbon dioxide inside each of the shards. (You can see them with a magnifying glass.) And when these shards melt in someone’s mouth, the gas bubbles pop. And I mean pop. Not just some soggy Rice Krispies–type pop, but a sound like fat crackling on a skillet—explosions, actual explosions, which registered seismically in the teeth, particularly if, like me, one decided to chomp down onto the Pop Rocks and not just let them dissolve on the tongue. Not only that, but Pop Rocks tasted good, sweet and fruity, and the different colors (cherry, grape, orange) actually had distinct flavors, not that it mattered especially because, my God, they exploded! A candy that explodes! No one had ever heard of such a thing. We were all instantly nuts.

  Pop Rocks came in little packets, like vegetable seeds, and they cost up to a dollar a pack. Rather than discouraging us, this exorbitance merely enhanced their standing. They assumed a kind of mythic place in the pantheon of our economy—like saffron or high-grade uranium. Again, the result was furious black market activity. The Bobby Hankeys of the world bought up cases and sold them from the trunks of cars. My friend Evan, who lived in Connecticut, where Pop Rocks had not yet entered the market, had his aunt send him a box from California, which he resold at a nifty profit. An urban myth quickly grew up around the frenzy. To wit: that the snot-nosed child TV star Mason Reese had ingested lethal amounts of Pop Rocks and Coke, causing his stomach to explode. (In certain quarters, this rumor named Mikey of Life Cereal fame as the victim.)

  By high school, the furor had shifted to gummy bears and later Jelly Bellys, both of which I consumed in embarrassing quantities, as a result, in part, of having taken a job at Edy’s Ice Cream, where both were sold in bulk. Gummy bears, in particular, suggested a certain sangfroid, because they were German. I tended to burn them with matches, thus combining my overt sugarlust with a more latent strain of pyromania. I loved the way the little gummy bear heads would sizzle and smoke, and the syrupy consistency of the resulting mess. I spent a considerable portion of my ninth-grade science class (best estimate: 40 percent) scorching the heads off gummy bears with the fabulous, empowering Bunsen burner.

  My point here is that the candy economy has always been driven by the peculiar, streaky passions of children. Over the past five years, the market for extreme candies has skyrocketed. Back in my day, extreme was represented by a candy called Zotz, which were mildly flavored hard candies filled with a citrusy powder that fizzed on the tongue. The modern Warhead, by contrast, is so sour it’s impossible to keep in your mouth, unless you happen to be a nine-year-old boy determined to keep a Warhead in your mouth longer than your friend.

  At last year’s Candy Expo, there was quite a buzz surrounding the Torcher Scorcher, which is a kind of Atomic Fireball gone apocalyptic. It is no longer rare to see candies with cayenne pepper and chilies. To me, this is taking things way too far in the direction of candy machismo/masochism. Then again, the Mother Unit said the same thing when I came home with a candy that exploded in my mouth.

  NIGHT OF THE LIVING FREAK

  The rhythms of freak are ruled by the holiday calendar, and specifically by Halloween, which as we all know, can be traced back to All Hallows’ Eve, an ancient religious rite in which priests raced around the streets of Dublin throwing snack-size Snickers bars at impoverished children.

  This is what I love about Halloween. It has, from a freak perspective, purity of intent. There’s no dallying about with God, or that contrived brand of devotion used to justify our other seasonal pageants of gluttony. There’s something incredibly liberating about a holiday that encourages children to take candy from strangers.

  Today, of course, our paranoia about child safety has reached this fabulous zenith whereby kids are only allowed to trick-or-treat accompanied by an adult and each piece of received candy is promptly and assiduously inspected with a metal detector and/or chemical toxicity kit. I watch the kids tromping about my neighborhood with their hawkeyed chaperones and I feel sorry for the poor little dudes. They hit maybe five houses an hour because the parents make each stop a little event, with thank-yous and much time spent admiring costumes and discussing the truly atrocious crimes that might befall children at any moment in these woeful days of ruination.

  But back in the blithe, porno-soaked, latch-key seventies, the idea of trick-or-treating with a parent in tow was unthinkable—like publicly disclosing a preference for Barry Manilow. And yes, we heard plenty of tales about creepy old men sinking razors into caramel apples. But this only added an allure of risk to the endeavor. (As Bobby Hankey used to put it: Don’t bite down if the blade is facing outward, dickweed.) We enjoyed the prospect of visiting iffy-looking houses and apartment complexes, because the people there had no sense of proportion and they led lives of mystery, amid their mysterious smells, and we could peek inside their homes at the strange artwork and the absence of furniture, and occasionally some guy would open the door in his underwear and throw quarters at us. This is how we learned about the world.

  For the true freak, Halloween was all about game-planning. You couldn’t just wander around, because you had a threehour window and every minute counted and more important than that you had this remarkable concept known as Freak Amnesty, which meant, on this one evening, that you were allowed to gather and consume as much candy as you could without parental objection.

  Come 6:30, I knew exactly where I was headed: up Wilkie Way toward Charleston, north onto Alma and back around to Meadow, with detours onto the densely packed streets surrounding Ventura, then to the skeezy apartments on James. I stayed away from fancy costumes, as these provoked discussion, and discussion was not what you wanted. You wanted a quick exchange. One year, I wrapped a bed sheet around me and went as … what? A Roman. A mummy. Origami. It was never quite clear.

  I raced from house to house, sore-shouldered and gasping, past the idiotic pumpkin smashers and egg chuckers, to the lit doorsteps, where a basket of c
andy would be presented for my princely consideration. So I proceeded until ten, with special emphasis on that final hour, when the crowds thin out and the benefactors, having invariably overstocked and now fretting the surplus, grow exorbitant.

  Now: I’m a great lover of visual art and I will happily discuss the color and texture of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, or the way in which the eye is led into Goya’s The Third of May 1808, and even though I don’t really know what I’m talking about, I can get myself awfully worked up, just as a fine sentence or paragraph (say, the opening salvo of Henderson the Rain King) can send me into shivery rapture. But I can think of nothing on earth so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night, which, for me, was ten to fifteen pounds of candy, a riot of colored wrappers and hopeful fonts, snub-nosed chocolate bars and SweeTARTS, the seductive rattle of Jujyfruits and Good & Plenty and lollipop sticks all akimbo, the foil ends of mini LifeSavers packs twinkling like dimes, and a thick sugary perfume rising up from the pillowcase.

  And more so, the pleasure of pouring out the contents onto the rug in the TV room, of cataloging the take according to a strict Freak Hierarchy, calling for all chocolate products to be immediately quarantined, sorted, and closely guarded, with higher-quality fruit chews and caramels next, then hard candies, and last of all anything organic (the loathsome raisins). A brief period of barter with my brothers might ensue. For the most part, I simply lay amid my trove and occasionally massed the candy into a pile which I could sort of dive into, à la Scrooge McDuck and his gold ducats.

  Again: I realize I was sick.

  For me, the crisis arose at about age fourteen, when it occurred to me that I was at least a foot taller than the other trick-or-treaters and that my elaborately polite pleas for candy were now being viewed as a kind of extortion.

  MISTAKES WERE MADE

  I hope I haven’t made my desires sound indiscriminate. They are not. When I disapprove of a candy, the sentiment often veers into wrath. A part of me wants to take the manufacturers by the short hairs and bitchslap some sense into them, though the real issue, obviously, is demand. It’s the consumers who are responsible, in the end, for the abominations of the Freak Kingdom.

  The one candy whose success is most puzzling to me is Twizzlers. Twizzlers is basically an imitation of red licorice, which, itself, has no cognate in the natural world. The defenders of this candy will probably object at this point, arguing that the most popular Twizzlers flavor is actually strawberry. In fact, Twizzlers bears roughly the same chemical relationship to strawberry as the Vienna Sausage does to filet mignon. Which is to say: none. Its flavor is so completely artificial that I’ve often wondered if the production staff might not endeavor to make it just a little more artificial, thus crossing over an invisible flavor threshold and allowing the product to start tasting less artificial. This is to say nothing of the Twizzlers texture, which falls somewhere between chitin and rain poncho.

  As a former Tangy Taffy user, I realize that I’m not exactly on solid ground as an arbiter of taste. But I can at least plead youthful indiscretion on that count, whereas I continue to encounter grown men and women (some of them otherwise desirable) who blithely chomp at their Twizzlers cud, breathing their plasticine reek onto the rest of us.

  To me, Twizzlers belongs to the same loathsome genus as the Jujubes. The young and fortunate reader may not have heard of Jujubes, and this candy will be hard to describe in a fashion that makes it sound suitable for human consumption. They were basically hard pellets the size and shape of pencil erasers. Indeed, if one were to set Jujubes beside pencil erasers in a blind taste test, it would be tough to make a distinction, except that pencil erasers have more natural fruit flavor.

  These are two examples of candies I refer to as MWMs (Mistakes Were Made). Other would include:

  Marshmallow Peeps: A candy that encourages the notion that it is acceptable to eat child offspring. Composed of marshmallow dyed piss yellow and sprinkled with sugar.

  Circus Peanuts: Again, a marshmallow pretending to be something else, this time a legume. An affront to elephants everywhere.

  Boston Baked Beans: If you are an actual peanut, why are you not covered in chocolate? Why are you covered, instead, in some kind of burnt-tasting brick red shell? Is the idea that you resemble a baked bean supposed to make you more alluring?

  Jordan Almonds: Who chose the color scheme, Zsa Zsa Gabor?

  Chuckles: A fruit jelly the consistency of cartilage. Explain.

  Sixlets: Those of us over the age of, say, three can usually differentiate between chocolate and brown wax.

  White jelly beans: I defy you to tell me what flavor white is supposed to signify. Pineapple? Coconut? Isopropyl?

  Lime LifeSavers: The LifeSavers people haven’t figured out by now that no one likes this flavor?

  Coconut: We now come to an area where I depart from the rational and enter the realm of the phobic. Oddly, it isn’t the flavor of coconut that troubles me, but the texture, and specifically that stringy residue utterly impervious to the normal processes of digestion. In short, I feel as if I’m chewing on a sweetened cuticle. Anyone who’s eaten a Mounds knows exactly what I’m talking about. The chocolate and corn syrup dissolve quickly enough and one is left with those stubborn fibers which lurk in the mouth and, eventually, maroon themselves in the crannies of one’s teeth. The exceptions to this embargo are products in which the coconut is either toasted or combined with other crunchy ingredients, thus obscuring the cuticle effect. The example that comes to mind is the brash and ridiculous Chick-OStick, a wand of peanut butter encased in brittle and sprinkled with toasted coconut.

  White chocolate: When I was eight or nine years old I flew from California to New York with my twin brother, Mike. We were unchaperoned and therefore doted on by the stewardesses, who snuck us each a special dessert from first class: a white chocolate lollipop. I wolfed mine down and, shortly thereafter, got violently ill. This was mortifying at the time. In retrospect, I’m sort of proud of myself.

  Vomiting strikes me as proper response to white chocolate, which is, in fact, not chocolate (as it contains no cocoa) but a scourge visited upon us by the inimical forces of Freak Evil.

  2

  CARAVELLE: AN ELEGY

  Art arises from loss. I wish this weren’t the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that is not what happens. What happens is we lie around in bed eating chocolate and screwing. Art is what happens when things don’t work out, when you’re licking your wounds. Art is, to a larger extent than people would like to think, a productive licking of the wounds.

  Loss, after all, leads rather naturally to the quest. The Greeks want Helen. Odysseus wants to get home (eventually). Dante wants Beatrice. Ahab wants the whale. Proust wants his cookies. And so on.

  In the instant case, this entire book arose from the loss of a single candy bar. I am speaking of the Caravelle, though for many years I had no name to attach to this want. I had only memories. I had myself, at the age of nine or so, anxious, be -reft, on a bus downtown to meet the therapist assigned the dubious task of restoring my capacity for self-love, and I had Mac’s Smoke Shop, where all the essential vices were gathered in the smoky, crepuscular gloom with men who were somehow lesser versions of my father, sad and preoccupied, right there next to me but totally out of reach, and where a glorious central rack of candy, which was, in turn, gathered around this one candy bar in its bright yellow wrapper. It cost a quarter. There were two pieces per pack.

  What was the Caravelle? It was a strip of caramel covered in a thick shell of milk chocolate, which was embedded with crisped rice. Yes, I know. That’s the 100 Grand. But no one with even the dullest palate could ever have confused the two. The chocolate in the 100 Grand is mild and crumbly. The crisped rice is mealy and deflated. The caramel is the color of a washed-out varnish. And the balance is all wrong. There simply isn’t enough chocolate or crisped rice to sustain the salivary breakdown. As
a result, you wind up with a mouthful of rubbery caramel.

  The Caravelle tasted more like a pastry: the chocolate was thicker, darker, full-bodied, and the crisped rise had a malty flavor and what I want to call structural integrity; the caramel was that rarest variety, dark and lustrous and supple, with hints of fudge. More so, there was a sense of the piece yielding to the mouth. By which I mean, one had to work the teeth through the sturdy chocolate shell, which gave way with a distinct, moist snap, through the crisped rice (thus releasing a second, grainy bouquet), and only then into the soft caramel core. Oh, that inimitable combination of textures! That symphony of flavors! And how they offered themselves to the heat and wetness of the mouth—the sensation of the crisped rice drenched in melted chocolate, chomped by the molars into the creamy swirl of caramel. Oh, woe and pity unto thee who never tasted this bar! True woe! True pity!

  Around the time I was starting high school, Cadbury acquired Peter Paul and the Caravelle was discontinued. I didn’t know this, of course. All I knew was that the best candy bar in the world was gone. And I went looking for the Caravelle everywhere. After a while, I couldn’t even remember the name of the bar, which meant that I spent countless hours describing it to one or another bemused shopkeeper, girlfriend, therapist. Strangers at parties. Potential muggers. I was frantic, inconsolable, really annoying.

  The disappearance of the Caravelle led me to the larger question: How is it that a candy bar, an absolutely sensational candy bar, can be banished to oblivion? How can the lovers of caramel and chocolate and crisped rice be left to satisfy themselves with the mealy indelicacy of the 100 Grand? This was an outrage, on par with VHS crushing Beta, a clear-cut consumer injustice perpetrated by that wonderful open market we’re all so careful to abide.