Sweet Tooth

by Tim Anderson

  The poster is damp now. The young man is blotching up Sinéad’s giant pristine alabaster pate with his sweaty teenage face. But that’s a lot of sweat, even for a fifteen-year-old. Yeah, he’s having another one of his cute little attacks that take him forever to realize he’s having. Let’s watch.

  He backs away from the poster and stares at it. Ah, he’s noticed the blotches. He reaches out his fingers and runs them over the damp parts, which are now softening up and wrinkling a little. He tilts his head as if to say, “Did I do that?”

  He’s struggling to remain standing. Yep, knees are going all wobbly. He manages to lean down, grasp the headboard of his bed, and shakily lower himself down, accidentally sitting Indian style on his pillow briefly before falling backward onto his twisted-up sheets. He enjoys the softness against his rubbery skin only fleetingly before tumbling from the bed onto the floor. That smarts. Looks like he landed on his Walkman.

  He rolls around trying to figure out which way is up for a few moments, which is just adorable. Finally he picks himself up and leans against his bed, trying to figure out his next move. Should he start picking at his hangnails? Should he stand up and stare at himself in the mirror for a while, enjoying the way his braces shimmer under the black light? Should he pass out?

  Looks like he’s becoming self-aware, like all great androids. He wipes his sweaty brow with his clammy hand, an action that drives home the point that he is a sebaceous mess and needs sugar now.

  His eyes flicker with a realization: He has some glucose tablets in the bedside drawer. He opens the top drawer and fishes them out, rummaging through papers and magazines and Kleenex and years of Soap Opera Digests. Does he never throw anything away?

  Finally he arrives at the box of tablets. He struggles to open it up with his wet hands, and eventually just grabs the end of the box and tears a portion of it off, like the Incredible Hulk would if he were a frail, skinny, white teenage homosexualist with diabetes and few working synapses. The box spills its contents, and the boy tears into the packaging, determined to put something, anything in his mouth pronto. He finally frees a tablet and clumsily shuffles it into his mouth.

  His teeth crunch, pop, and grind against the giant tablet.

  He quickly devours the first one and tears another one out of its aluminum cage. Crunch. Pop. Grind. Sigh. Wiping of the brow.

  The boy eats the entire box of chalky tablets, leaning back against his dresser, staring up at the beacon of hope that is the glowing head of the hairless woman on his wall. Does she stare down at him benevolently and tell him he will be OK, that one day sugar-free candy won’t make him have to vomit and shit at the same time, and that his destiny is not necessarily the piping hot punishment of eternal damnation just because he’d rather tongue-kiss Scott Baio than do just about anything else ever?

  No, she doesn’t. But with all of the adrenaline coursing through his system right now, he’s hearing what he wants to hear.

  CHAPTER 4

  I stood in my bedroom looking into the mirror and admiring the new piece of jewelry hanging from my neck. Well, “jewelry” might be too strong a word. It was certainly a necklace. But you wouldn’t find yourself surprising your girlfriend or boyfriend with it and a box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day, unless you were being really ironic.

  What I was so prominently displaying on a chain that hung over my crisp white button-up shirt was my official medical tag. On one side was a snake wrapped around a staff—the Rod of Asclepius, the symbol of medicine. The other side was more prosaic. Just one word, short and sweet: DIABETIC.

  I wasn’t sure about wearing this thing at first, and I especially hadn’t intended to go around flaunting it. But then my sister and her friends—all vintage-store-shopping dynamos—were all “Oh, it’s so cool, you should wear it on the outside of your shirt with a vest!” and I was therefore convinced that this diabetic necklace might possibly be considered a bold fashion statement.

  I was really getting into vests, like any New Wave newbie worth his Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark cassettes. Laurie was wearing them, and fabulously. So was Brian, sexily. So was Laurie’s best friend, Alison, with panache. I wanted to break me off a piece of that pie, so I went on down to the Goodwill and got myself a smashing collection of vests no doubt infested with traces of rat droppings, lice, and human blood. And there I stood in front of my mirror, in a thin blue paisley vest, a white button-up shirt with extra-long cuffs, and the glistening, sun-kissed disease advertisement hanging around my neck. Fetching as all heck.

  I was on my way to my part-time job at Kerr Drug at Eastgate Shopping Center, a dreary, half-dead strip mall in North Raleigh. I was returning to it after a little time off during my diagnosis, convalescence, and cathartic series of temper tantrums. School had started again, too. It was time to go back to the real world of autumn after the Summer of the Failing Pancreas and test my diabetic training wheels in a less controlled environment.

  I worked the front register at the drugstore, ringing folks up for cigarettes, candy bars, ugly but cheap lawn furniture from the seasonal aisle, shitty eyeglass frames, cosmetics, and impulse buys like the Enquirer, Weekly World News, and Big League Chew. It was a great job for a new type 1 diabetic in the thick of the honeymoon period, because I had all of the emergency sugar I could possibly need. Right across the counter from me was a wonderland of 5th Avenues, 3 Musketeers, Snickers, Milky Ways, and Mounds. If I felt a low blood sugar attack coming on, I was well defended.

  It was the least glamorous job a boy could have, but this boy didn’t know that. I wielded power at this job. Because this was in the days before the price scanner, I was able to charge folks whatever I wanted for whatever they wanted. This meant that my friends/people I wanted to impress from school could come in and buy a pack of cigarettes and I could give them a reasonable discount. I wouldn’t give it to them for free, because that would have been wrong, perhaps even sinful. But God probably didn’t have a problem with, say, twenty to thirty percent off, did he?

  The uniform for men at Kerr Drug was slacks, shirt, and tie. The uniform for the ladies was decidedly less strict; whatever they could find to barely cover their sexy bodies was fine: skirts, short skirts, miniskirts, blouses, tight-ass blouses, low-cut T-shirts, heels, sandals, bikinis, thongs, whatever. I thought this double standard was unfair, so I had slowly started flouting the rules and dispensing with the tie. I was starting to enjoy the idea of standing out from my peers anyway. In years past I had always wanted to be a coolio, walking around school wearing a letter jacket, high-fiving other good-looking coolios in the hallways, and getting blow jobs from soccer players under the bleachers at halftime, while crying, like in the 1950s. But as I entered my second year of high school, it was painfully clear that this was not going to be happening, ever. For one thing, I didn’t like sports. And it’s incredibly difficult, even impossible, to be a good jock if you don’t play, much less even appreciate, sports. Sure, I kind of liked tennis, but you didn’t even have to wear an athletic supporter for that.

  So it was a good thing that I was getting a little more comfortable being a weirdo, because the time I spent hunting for hot threads at the American Way Thrift Store and Goodwill meant that I was more and more often showing up to work as if I’d just left the set of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. It was all tight, spastically patterned polyester pants, increasingly blousy and/or country-western shirts, and, of course, vests, vests, vests.

  And compared to the staid dudes that worked with me at Kerr Drug, all of whom looked as if the most sartorially transgressive thought they’d ever entertained was whether or not to wear a pink necktie, I was a fairy princess. But that changed ever so slightly when I went back to work and found that there was a new employee in town manning the pharmacy register: Josh Epstein, who, like me, didn’t fit the Kerr Drug mold.

  It wasn’t because I got strong gay vibes off him. No, Josh broke the mold in a very different way: first and foremost, because he was all Jewey, in direct
opposition to the decidedly Anglo-Saxon character of all the other guys working there. He wore thick glasses, had an awkward gait, didn’t seem comfortable interacting with the public—or other humans generally—and he had a marvelously large Jew-fro that he wasn’t afraid to wear at maximum capacity. Though from the neck down he wore the costume of the establishment (shirt and tie), there was always something slightly askew about his presentation: tie crooked, Batman undershirt clearly visible through his yellow shirt, dirty sneakers on his feet. The boy was a social disaster, and I loved him for that. And I had an excellent view of it from my perch at the front register. I could stand at my station and stare across the store at the pharmacy on the opposite end, and there Josh and his fro would be at the pharmacy register, wordlessly ringing up a customer or filing away a newly filled prescription into the trays. I was intrigued by his matter-of-fact approach to his self-presentation. He wasn’t trying to hide anything, wasn’t trying to impress anyone. And he was getting away with it, as far as I was concerned. Though by any conventional measure, Josh was not a looker, he had something going for him that I couldn’t put my finger on. I hoped to one day put my finger on it.

  I would stand at my register—ringing up, say, a creepy regular customer who came in every day for cigarettes wearing a blond Don Johnson wig, mirror shades, and a five o’clock shadow that appeared to be painted on—and all the while would be staring at Josh up at the pharmacy counter as he leaned against the register, adjusted his enormous glasses, or stared quizzically at a customer as they talked at him. I had a crush.

  Eventually, after a full shift of my gawking, Josh got wise to me, and he started staring back. Not with any malice or irritation. Just with a blank, curious face. We would just stand at our registers between customers and stare at each other, me chewing on a Snickers bar, him looking up from his homework and pushing part of his fro out of his face, or me eating some corn chips and him running a customer’s credit card through the machine and waiting for him or her to sign it. We were making a connection. The more we stared, the more convinced I was that we would eventually share a meaningful fifteen-minute break in the back of his parents’ station wagon, which he drove to work and parked out front. Whenever he would leave for his break and would have to pass by my register, he would nod and smile, his eyes lingering on me just long enough to make it pointed, and I would smile, watch him leave, and try to determine what fresh fruit his round butt most resembled under those khaki slacks. A pair of Granny Smith apples? Two shaved peaches? Couple of cantaloupes?

  It was mild, mysterious flirtations like this that helped get me through my twitchy days as a sophomore at Sanderson High School. Well, that and the fact that I could use my new disease as a reason to get out of school when things became too much for me, be they geometric proofs, the scientific method, or the sight of Darryl McClintock’s rock-hard abs in the locker room after gym. The first few times I left early were legitimate. I’d had low blood sugar attacks in class, flooded my body with adrenaline, and felt exhausted as a result, rendering myself useless to my teachers. After the first attack, Mom had decided to sign a note that the attendance ladies could keep on file, saying that I could go home whenever I needed to.

  In a different teenager’s hands this could have been a dangerous thing indeed. Another lusty young closeted gay boy less concerned with keeping his GPA up and getting into a decent college might have used this as a way to ditch school all the time and go to Crabtree Valley Mall to visit the men’s restrooms and read all the dirty messages on the stalls. Not this lusty closeted gay boy. I only left when I absolutely needed to. Like if I’d forgotten to do my homework or left my lab report at home or wanted to take a nap.

  One thing that I was finding myself ditching more and more was Young Life. Sitting in some schoolmate’s living room with a few college kids strumming guitars and singing squeaky-clean pop songs or Christian rock favorites no longer held the appeal it once did. The summer had really changed things. My world had shifted, and I couldn’t go back to the age of innocence I’d pissed away all over Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. Life was so much more dirty and complicated than Michael W. Smith or Amy Grant had communicated to me.

  This wasn’t to say I didn’t still adore Brad and resent the hell out of his girlfriend. But I was coming to the slow realization that maybe I was barking up the wrong strong, supple, sexy tree, and that my dream of one day getting Brad drunk enough to get naked with me might have been a bit unrealistic—especially for someone who was still five years away from legally drinking. And besides, booze doesn’t make you gay. Sometimes gayish, maybe. But not gay. And I think deep down I knew this.

  Not that I was even remotely ready to admit the truth of myself to myself. This was 1987, and we were neck-deep in AIDS fear and paranoia. The last thing you wanted to reveal in Ronald Reagan’s and Jesse Helms’s America was that you were a boy who liked boys. It was hard enough to admit you were a boy who liked soap operas. So I sublimated. All this angst went into growing out my bangs, writing terrible poetry, picking out Smiths songs on the violin, and amassing an enviable collection of post-punk and New Wave cassettes.

  If you were a pale dude who wore eyeliner and had an equally unhappy band of moppets slinking around your videos on 120 Minutes, I wanted to hear what you had to sing about. (Also if you were Siouxsie.) I was transforming into a terrible, angsty teenage goth monster. Worse, a goth monster who, given the opportunity, would happily go down on David the student council president. How could Jesus love such a thing? How could such a thing love Jesus?

  And anyway, I was now stepping out with my new New Wave friends, like Heather, my only new New Wave friend, who I met at a Sanderson football game. She complimented me on my black cardigan and Sugarcubes T-shirt, I complimented her on her brown cardigan and Smiths T-shirt, and the rest was history. She started showing up at Kerr Drug Eastgate to get her friendship discount on cigarettes, and in return she would let me smoke one in her car and then drive me home as we listened to her Gene Loves Jezebel tape all the way to my house.

  It was Heather who would escort me to a party at which my diabetes would collide cataclysmically with my warped hormones. My blood sugar and barely suppressed gayness would be let off their leashes to flail across the grounds of a country farmhouse in some neighboring town where a huge throng of Raleigh high schoolers were gathered to drink a sugary, fruity, bloodred alcoholic punch. This party would cause the world to shift on its axis and alter forever the music of the spheres. Things would get sloppy.

  A beige 1986 Toyota Camry pulled into the Kerr Drug parking lot one Friday night and stopped in front of me where I was sitting on a bench outside the entrance.

  “Hey, this is Sarah,” Heather said from the passenger seat, pointing at the girl behind the steering wheel. We had plans to go to something called a “PJ Party” out in the sticks somewhere. I’d never been to one of these types of parties, but some kids had been talking it up at school, and I’d overheard them, so I had some firsthand secondhand knowledge. It apparently involved a big vat of red Kool-Aid augmented with vodka and Everclear, whatever that was.

  “Hey!” I said to Sarah, thinking, So this is the girl who sluts it up all the time. Heather had told me about Sarah and her amorous ways with boys at Sanderson. It was kind of a shock to hear this kind of talk about her, because I remembered Sarah from middle school, and she’d worn glasses back then. People sure changed when they switched to contacts. But I was all for reinvention and was certainly excited to finally be face to face with someone near my age who I knew for a fact had had sex. I’d heard a short list of dudes she had banged, and it was very impressive. Not the number, although that was quite staggering as well. It was the quality of dudes. All hot dudes. Smoking hot dudes. There was not one dude among them who I would not have allowed/paid to take me behind the ESL trailer at school to diagram a few very long sentences.

  “Hey,” Sarah said in return, her eyes hidden behind her Madonna sunglasses.

  �
�We’re staying at her place tonight. Her parents are out of town.”

  “Cool.”

  We went over to dump our stuff at Sarah’s house before heading out to the barn in the middle of nowhere where this PJ thing was happening. I tried to make conversation with Sarah so she would start to feel comfortable talking to me about all of her sexy hookups, but she wasn’t a terribly chatty individual.

  “So have you been to one of these PJ parties before?” I asked Sarah while Heather was microwaving ramen noodles in the kitchen.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Or actually, maybe not, I can’t remember. I’ve had PJ before, though.”

  The sun was setting as we headed out of Raleigh toward Creedmoor, where this legendary barn sat in the middle of a field surrounded by rolling hills, beckoning to the hedonist high school students from the surrounding counties to stop by and taste the devil’s favorite fruity cocktail.

  On the way there Sarah and I had decided to sip on some of her Jack Daniel’s to wet our whistles. It was disgusting, and terrible for the diabetes, but I couldn’t get enough.

  “So Sarah,” I said after slamming a swig of Jack directly from the bottle, “are you gonna hook up tonight?” I was living vicariously through the only slut I knew.

  “Uh…I don’t know, maybe,” Sarah said, laughing dismissively and looking at Heather as if to say, “Why is he talking to me so much?”

  “Cool, cool,” I said, nodding my head, lifting the Jack Daniel’s bottle to my mouth, and hitting myself in the teeth with it as I tried to take another swig.

  It took about a half hour to get out to the barn, and by the time we got there the party was thick with depravity. The barn was actually a cabin house, and the cabin house was full of crazy kids on a bender. Who were all these people? Whose cabin was this anyway? Nobody cared, because holy damn, look at that big vat of PJ in the kitchen!