Candyfreak

by Steve Almond

  A FEW FINAL RELEVANT FACTS

  1. After visiting the Annabelle factory, I did drive back to Palo Alto, mostly so I could have dinner with my grandfather Gabriel Almond. He was the last of my grandparents, a worldfamous political scientist whose wife had, quite abruptly, died on him two years earlier.

  My brothers and I spent a lot of time at his house when we were kids, swimming in the pool out back. Of the house itself, I remember most vividly a high cupboard in the kitchen where he and my grandmother kept cookies in a variety of metal boxes whose precise shapes and colors I can still see if I close my eyes. He had something of a sweet tooth, in other words, which he had passed down to his son Richard, and on down to me. I should note that the adoption of a brown spaniel puppy named Snickers had provided him immeasurable solace as a widower.

  Dinner was fine. Gabe was a man of considerable charm and he took an interest in my literary pursuits, having been an exceedingly (annoyingly) prolific writer himself. But afterwards, as I drove him back to the little apartment where he had recently moved, a cloud of despair descended on us both. He was depressed by the disappearance of his wife and the home they had made together. The various medications intended to soothe his heart had gummed the powerful gears of his mind. He was too tired to pretend otherwise. Outside, the storm was outrageous. The wind knocked at the windows and made the panes moan. We sat for a while in that darkened apartment and it felt to me as if the keepers of our sadness, those lonely little men who live behind the heart, were calling out to one another: I am here! I am here! Are you there? Are you there?

  “What’s this new project about?” Gabe said finally.

  I told him it was about candy bars. But I didn’t know if I could explain what I was really getting at: that candy had been my only dependable succor as a child, that it had, in a sense saved my life, that I hoped to draw a link between my personal nostalgia and the cultural yearning for a simpler age, but that, in the end, the laws of the candy world were the laws of the broader world: the strong survived, the weak struggled, people sought pleasure to endure their pain.

  Snickers whimpered in his sleep and Gabe reached down to rub his neck.

  “Actually,” I said, “you make a cameo in the book.”

  “Is that so?”

  I told him the Necco story, how he used to send his oldest son out with six cents to buy the Sunday New York Times and how his son would lose a penny down the sewer so he could buy himself Necco wafers.

  “Did he?” Gramps gazed at me with his soft brown eyes. “I didn’t know that.” He slowly yielded himself to a smile, the last one of his I would ever see. “Well, good for him.”

  2. Back in Boston, I decided to throw a candy-tasting party. I felt it was important that my friends have a chance to taste the strange harvest of my journey. I went so far as to slice the bars into bite-size pieces and lay them out on a cutting board. My fantasy was that people would sample each piece and offer witty bons mots, which I could then steal and use for this very book. Unfortunately, I run with a pretty flaky crowd, sweet people to be sure, but not terribly organized. There was also some drinking that happened and some smoking of pot, and this tended to impair the evaluative process. My own notes from the party are not much help to me now. Here is a sample:

  blair says u-no like crayon

  nice finish (george)

  spud spackle, yeah, spackle

  I caulk the line (johnny cash?)

  Much of the focus of the party was on the unique shape of the Twin Bings. Comparisons were made, both verbal and visual, to the male reproductive organs. I let it slip that Marty Palmer referred to legumes as nutmeats (this seemed germane) and things went downhill from there. I woke the next morning to find that the remains of my candy bars had been arranged, on my kitchen table, in a pornographic tableau.

  There was, however, one happy by-product of this gathering. In a moment of freak inspiration, I decided to place a Haviland Thin Mint between two pieces of a dark chocolate Kit Kat. What happened was this: my teeth sent the crisp cookies plunging into the gooey mint, the two chocolates melted into a bittersweet swirl, and my tongue—my tongue went into multiple orgasms. It was the very day after this party that I decided to buy an entire case of Kit Kat Darks—twelve boxes of 36. When I went to pick up this case from a local candy wholesaler, the receptionist told me her phone had been ringing off the hook with requests. Hershey’s had discontinued production, of course. Nonetheless, the bar had achieved cult status.

  3. Several weeks after my visit, on Christmas Day in fact, my grandfather died. So I got on a plane and flew back to California for the memorial. This was a somber event, full of the sort of muffled sorrow and confusion that ensues when a patriarch dies. That night, I drove with my older brother, Dave, up to his home in Napa. I wanted to visit my nephews, Daniel, age two and a half, and Lorenzo, fourteen months, or, as they are generally referred to these days, the Wrecking Crew. (Dave prefers the designation Team Head Contusion.)

  Strangely, almost creepily, Dave has never shown much interest in candy. Even as a little kid, I can remember him eating half a candy bar and then simply losing interest. I remember this because I was always hoping to chickenhawk his remains and because I was continually thwarted in this endeavor by Dave, who, come to think of it, may have been feigning disinterest simply to torture me. But no, he really is one of those sad cases who feels no sense of urgency in the presence of candy. Worse still, his wife, Lisa, has been pretty hardcore about not allowing the Wrecking Crew to eat processed sugar. My concern, obviously, is that the freak bloodlines are looking pretty watery right about now. My saving grace is that Daniel recently discovered jelly beans. I, of course, had noticed the sign for the Jelly Belly factory (FREE TOURS DAILY!) just a few miles outside of Napa.

  The next day, Dave headed off to the clinic where he works as a doctor and Lisa and I spent the morning trying to keep the Wrecking Crew from killing one another, themselves, us. In a moment of unexpected laxity, Lisa agreed to take the kids on an expedition to the Jelly Belly factory. I had imagined we would be allowed down onto the factory floor to watch the machines bang out beans. But the tours were actually conducted by means of video presentations. The Wrecking Crew was not really at the point where it processed information passively. Which is to say: It needed to be in motion. It needed to touch things. It was not prepared to sit quietly and watch a video on the intricacies of the starch mogul. At one point, Daniel, in a heroic (if errant) attempt to reach the factory floor, opened a door marked EMERGENCY EXIT and set off a blood-curdling alarm, causing both him, and then Lorenzo, to start bawling.

  Here again, the gentle reader might fairly claim that freak disaster has risen up and squashed freak joy. But this trip was actually something of a turning point for me. Not that I enjoyed seeing the Wrecking Crew in anquish, those smooth cheeks flushed and shimmering. Such naked hurt! Such soft soft hearts! I wanted to snatch them up and carry them away from the alarm, the sourpuss tour guide, the terrible indignities awaiting them. But that wasn’t an option. The basic provisions of life include a certain portion of sadness. Against this, we have only the love we grant one another, and the love we grant ourselves. And so Lisa and I picked the boys up and brushed away their tears and carried them as far as we could, to the end of the factory tour, where they were each awarded a bag of jelly beans. The effects were instantaneous. Daniel wriggled from his mother’s arms and performed an impromptu Dance of the Freak. Lorenzo began to lick his bag.

  Downstairs, the Crew, restored to a state of relative equilibrium, insisted we stop at the pushcart where a young woman was doling out samples. Daniel watched intently, ferociously, as the Mistress of Bean reached into one of her 40 drawers with a tiny silver scoop and bestowed unto each child a single Jelly Belly. Then he sidled over to the little stool at the end of the cart and climbed onto it and reached matter-of-factly for the nearest drawer, which happened to contain root beer beans. Lisa was busy trying to prevent Lorenzo from eating samples off the
floor. The Mistress of Bean was tending to other screaming freaklets. Thus it was left to me to restrain Daniel. I was conflicted. Obviously, this was not a good situation, in terms of discipline, in terms of germs. And yet: you had to admire the kid’s form. He had cased out the joint, fair and square, and figured a way in. Root beer was an excellent flavor. In the end, I managed to coax him away from the cart by (somewhat reluctantly) offering him my free bag of beans.

  Outside, the sky was blue, the traffic was mild, the Crew was in high spirits. I knew there was heavy weather waiting for me back in Boston, where the clouds hung fat with rolling pins of doubt. But, for the first time in months, I felt I could foresee the day those clouds might lift. Something essential was shifting inside me, taking shape, something not unlike faith. America, with its insatiable needs, its flagrant solipsism, was redeeming itself a little, in the form of the Wrecking Crew, who seemed, at that particular moment, as they scampered across the empty parking lot, laughing, their tongues stained a joyful red, to represent the single unassailable blessing of our homeland: the pursuit of happiness as a redemptive impulse.

  Daniel, for his part, understood this. He had managed to score two free bags of Jelly Bellies, which he blissfully munched to extinction on the ride home. He spent the remainder of my visit gazing plaintively into my face, repeating a single, solemn incantation: I want jelly bean.

  There is hope for him yet.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not exist without the concerted enabling of the following freaks:

  The entire Almond family, especially Team Head Contusion, for not yet disowning me; Pat Flood, Holden Lewis, Bruce Machart, and Keith Morris for reading the first draft and urging me to write a second; Erin Falkevitz, Tim Huggins, Victor Cruz, Kirk Semple, Tommy Finkel, Dave Blair and Zach Leber for indulging countless vices; Joël Glenn Brenner, Lisbeth Echeandia, Steve Traino, Ray Broekel, and Bob Stengal for answering my idiotic questions; the Big Ruskie, the Gay Lumber jack, and the rest of my various poker freaks for supplying me a small (and undependable) weekly stipend, Eve Bridberg, Chris Castellani, and all the Grub Street freaks for keeping their muse on, my students for putting up with my rant-first-take-questions-later pedagogy; all the Chocolate Gods for so generously (and foolishly) welcoming me into their world, especially Manny De Costa, Chris Middings, Dave Bolton, Joanne Barthel, Carl and David Goldenberg, Marty Palmer, Russ Sifers, Dave Wagers, and Susan Karl. A special shout out to Kathy Pories, Mistress of Pain, for whipping this bad boy into fighting trim, and to anyone who owns or works in an indie bookstore for pimping what you love, and to anyone who still reads—bless you for feeling what you are inside.