Sweet Tooth

by Tim Anderson

  We all lined up to ladle out a plastic cup of the poisonous punch for ourselves, and things pretty quickly turned into Swirl City. This stuff was good! Murder on the blood sugar, but hell, it was Friday, I could take one night off from my monastic and joyless diet plan. I’d just let my hair down this once and give my taste buds a reason not to cry themselves to sleep.

  I’d never really been drunk before, so I was in virgin territory that night. I’d had enough beers to get happy and dumb on a few occasions, but I’d never really just stone-cold ignored the voice in the back of my head telling me, “Whoa, sister, you’ve had enough now, I think.” But I was different now. I was getting away with things. I had sloughed off my former squeaky-clean self and was trying on a new persona: careless idiot. I’d been getting pretty good at drawing out insulin into a syringe and jabbing myself with it, one-handed, while driving. My new favorite thing to do was to take out my glucometer, prick my finger, and test my blood sugar while, say, sitting in a crowded Taco Bell. (Or while driving.) In short, I was a rebel, a teenage tough, a boy unafraid to wear tight polyester pants to church. So this was the first time I’d ever be getting full-on sloppy drunk, and I was planning to be good at it.

  After a few cups full of the red elixir of destiny I was quite chatty. I talked to strangers. I talked to people at school whom I hated for some reason. I talked to people who had their backs to me. I followed Heather around for a while to see if I could talk to some of the people she was talking to, then got lost and couldn’t find my way back to the PJ. Thankfully, I talked a person into escorting me back to it.

  I was now fuzzily drunk enough to start walking around trying to find people who couldn’t possibly be at the party. The person I wanted to find? Fellow outside-the-boxer Josh Epstein, from work. He had to be here somewhere.

  I staggered around looking hither and yon for Mr. Epstein’s Jew-fro. On the back porch I thought I caught a glimpse of it, but then realized it was just a potted fern hanging from the ceiling. Then I saw Ruth, of “diabetes is a disease, I’m sure it’s just heatstroke” infamy. She was standing with Kathleen from homeroom, who not only had a bitching Metallica necklace around her neck every day, she also had the most winning metal hair in all the land.

  “Tim! Tim! Oh my God, I didn’t know you were going to be here!”

  We rushed to embrace, slamming our sloppy bodies against each other.

  “Are you drinking PJ?” she asked.

  “Of course!” I said, raising my plastic cup as if to toast Ruth for noticing.

  “Yay!” Kathleen shouted, raising her cup and clinking mine.

  “You know,” Ruth said with her concerned face on, “PJ has a LOT of sugar in it. You better be careful.” Kathleen looked much less concerned as she tipped her cup to her mouth and PJ onto her face.

  “Oh, Ruth, I’ll be fine, I’m cool, no problem,” I somehow made my mouth say, knowing full well my blood sugar was on its way to the ionosphere. “I haven’t had that much and are you ready for more ’cause I kind of want some more it’s really good!” My mouth was already starting to get dry and sticky from the hyperglycemia. “Have you seen that guy Josh?” I ducked inside in order to avoid any more of the diabetic inquisition, and refilled my cup. It was then that I noticed a tub in the kitchen. Somehow I hadn’t seen this before. Inside it was a girl with a mohawk wearing an Exploited T-shirt lying down drinking Boone’s Farm.

  “You really should put that down and come get some of this,” I said to her rolling eyeballs as I lifted up my filled plastic cup. To my amazement, she didn’t tell me to go fuck myself or start quoting X-Ray Spex lyrics to me. She delicately placed her bottle of terrible wine on the floor, stood up in the bathtub like a lady, and stepped out and over to the vat of PJ, taking my advice to heart.

  “You’re probably right,” she said, her tone serious and, ironically, sober.

  There was Heather talking to a guy with a mohawk and an Exploited T-shirt on. I floated over and said hello to Heather, then turned to her friend.

  “I just met your girlfriend in the bathtub,” I said, pointing to his twin over by the PJ, who had started drinking straight out of the ladle.

  He looked at her, looked at me, then said, “I don’t know that girl.”

  They really should meet. Wait, what was I just obsessing about? Oh yeah, Josh. None of the people in that kitchen looked anything like him, so I trundled back onto the porch. Then I saw him. Not Josh, but him.

  He was standing outside in the crowded front yard among a small cluster of guys. Tall and lean, with bedhead and a handsome face. He wore a long unbuttoned black trench coat that opened to reveal brown corduroy pants and a dark red sweater. His hair was brown and wavy, and he smiled when he talked, often raising his eyebrows in a friendly expression of sincere interest in whatever bullshit the person in front of him was saying. Oh, how I wanted him to feign interest in me.

  As I stood on the front porch gawking, Heather bounded into me from behind and shook me out of my daydream, clucking, “Having fun?!”

  “Yes! Where’s Mr. Exploited?”

  “Oh, I think he went to the bathroom.”

  “And Mrs. Exploited?”

  “Back in the tub.”

  Heather wandered down the steps and into the front yard, where she floated over to a group of girls chatting next to the guy in the trench coat. So I followed and sidled up to her, trying to listen to their chatter while also eavesdropping on what the dudes next to us were saying and whether they might have said something about the guy in the trench coat liking to kiss boys. They seemed to be just talking about weed. I looked over at the girls, and they were all staring at me, expectantly. Had one of them asked me a question?

  “What’d you say?” I asked, taking another sip of PJ.

  “Do you know anyone here?” a girl with a thick mane of curly locks in the shape of a big furry parabola asked. She was holding a plastic cup of bloodred bubonic juice, and her big, pin-up girl lips seemed to be coated with the stuff.

  “I don’t know you, do I?” I queried.

  “I’m Jennifer,” she said.

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “So,” Jennifer asked for the third damn time, “do you know anyone here…besides me?”

  “I saw my friend Ruth, and I think someone from my church might be here? Also, I know Heather.”

  Heather and Jennifer nodded silently, then shook hands and exchanged pleasantries and cigarettes. (“I’ve been wanting to try these,” Heather said about Jennifer’s Benson & Hedges DeLuxe Ultra Lights 100s.)

  “Excuse me, do you have a light?” someone next to me asked. I turned and, Lordy be, it was the guy in the trench coat, smiling big and holding in his hand what appeared to be an illegal thing that one might smoke if one had something to light it with.

  I didn’t have a light, but I poked Heather to get hers from her. I presented it to him as if it were placed delicately upon a small silk pillow.

  “Thanks,” he said, expertly lighting his doobie. “You want a toke?”

  I’ve never once said no to that question in the years since this party, so it makes sense that without any hesitation I said “Sure!” and pivoted away from Heather and Co. over toward the trench coat guy’s merry group of pot-smoking ruffians.

  As we passed around the joint the guys continued their conversation, which was about the band INXS, which had recently played the Civic Center.

  “I love the drummer!” I said, way too enthusiastically. The guys looked at me with curious expressions and nodded absently. “I mean, you know, he’s a really great drummer.” And he has an amazing body.

  “You play the drums?” the trench coat guy asked.

  “No, I just really like drummers.” Particularly that one.

  “For my money, nobody beats The Smiths,” he said, taking another toke and melting my heart. “Johnny Marr is a genius.”

  “Oh yeah,” I nodded, “and of course, the singer is hilarious.”

  “Yeah,” he said.<
br />
  And what, I wanted to ask, do you make of the singer’s…inclinations? One of his buddies started talking about Amsterdam, which renewed the talk of weed. I stayed where I was, downed the rest of my PJ, and watched the trench-coated dreamboat’s face as he talked. The weed was mixing with the PJ in my blood to send messed-up signals to my brain about him. The more I watched his mouth move—sugary lips curling, tongue gliding across teeth—the more convinced I was that this guy had stuck his tongue down a guy’s throat once or twice. Maybe we could take a walk behind the house and I could be the second or third.

  He handed me the joint again, and I took a particularly long tug on it and handed it back. When he took it from me his fingers brushed over mine, sending an electric shock through my entire body.

  “Hey, anyone want another cup?” I asked. Because when in doubt, offer to bring people more alcohol. It makes them like you. (I think I read that in Tiger Beat.) Nobody answered, so I bounded back inside and into the kitchen, where the crowd had grown even denser around the vat. I grabbed two paper cups and squeezed my way into the center, where one person was ladling punch into the cups of whoever stuck theirs out. As drunk as I was, I was remarkably adroit in my quest for more booze. I steadily stretched out one hand, got one cup filled up by the wandering ladle, then pulled my hand back and switched the full cup to the other hand and sent the empty cup in for more. I then withdrew my arm from the center and carefully backed out of the kitchen with two cups of bloodred sugary death syrup for me and one other person to enjoy outside.

  “More PJ?” I said to trench coat guy when I returned to the smoking circle outside, holding out the cup for him.

  “Oh,” he said. “Uh, thanks.” He moved the joint he had in one hand to his other hand, then took the cup from me and gulped some of it down. He leaned over to listen to one of his friends, who was saying something I couldn’t hear. Trench coat guy had an adorable little puddle of red liquid clinging to his not-quite-there blond moustache. I managed to get his attention and signaled to him that he needed to wipe his mouth. He smiled and did so, then continued listening to his friend’s story.

  I took a few swigs of PJ and looked around at the little clusters of partygoers standing outside and chitchatting.

  “Have you seen Sarah?” Heather’s disembodied voice said behind me suddenly.

  “Uh-uh,” I answered.

  “Oh my God, if she’s left with someone I’m gonna be so pissed,” Heather continued. “How will we get home?”

  “I’m sure she’s here somewhere. It’s still early.” I had no idea what time it was. “You should check inside.”

  Heather looked at me. “Be right back.”

  “Hey, man, can I hit that again?” I said to trench coat guy, pointing to what was left of the joint in his hand. Actually, I was swaying so determinedly that I pointed at his cup, pointed at his friend’s stomach, then pointed at the joint on the way back up.

  “Sure, here you go.”

  I toked on the doobie until my eyes crossed, then, after offering it to his friend’s stomach, handed it back to him and said thank you.

  I was now well and truly wasted beyond all justification: bombed out on Everclear, stoned as a wombat, swaying from side to side like a melting metronome, and with a blood sugar level that was no doubt creeping dangerously into “drop face-first into a coma” territory. So naturally I was in the mood for love. And at that point, with the trench coat guy so close to me, I made a terrible, terrible error in judgment.

  I swayed close to him and grabbed his crotch.

  “Get away from me, man,” trench coat guy said. Not angrily, but quietly, adamantly.

  [SCREAMING, INSIDE MY HEAD.]

  I forced myself to laugh and swayed away from him, but I didn’t bother to wait around and see if my action had been seen by his friends or by anyone else outside. I backed away, turned around, and bolted into the darkened field where all the kids had parked their cars.

  Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, my life is over, I’ve been found out, I’ll never work in this town again. I stumbled toward the darkness, desperate to disappear, to be invisible; to dig a grave for myself, dive in, and tunnel my way to Beijing.

  I reached the rows of cars and kept moving, looking for a good one to duck behind and get out of sight. By some miracle I spied the vehicle that had brought me to this den of sin: Sarah’s car. Scuttling over to it, I crouched down, and sat on the back bumper. I looked back at the farmhouse and the kids on the lawn, which was lit by a single porch light—I couldn’t see anyone, which meant that no one could see me. Leaning back against the trunk, I remembered that Heather had given me her cigarettes to hold because she didn’t want to bring her purse in to the party. I reached in my pocket, retrieved a Camel Light, and lit it with the lighter she always kept in her packs.

  I exhaled a plume of angst and smoke, playing over in my head the scene that had just gone down over at the farmhouse. OK, OK, let’s see, I had a little PJ, had some pot, talked to Heather, talked to Ruth and Kathleen, talked to a girl in a mohawk in a bathtub, talked to a guy in a trench coat, oh, and I JUST GRABBED HIS CROTCH WITH MY WHOLE HAND. Not secretly, in the woods, on the outskirts of town, with a Richard Nixon mask on my face. No, it was at a high school party, in front of a bunch of people, while rip-roaring drunk, in front of the guy’s friends. I tried to remember who else could have possibly seen it. When the guy told me to get away from him, he didn’t shout it, he said it almost under his breath. A good sign? Maybe. He wasn’t giving the go-ahead to his friends to come after me with knives, I guess. At least he didn’t go to my school.

  Just as I had decided that perhaps—PERHAPS—I might live to see another day, the car started moving. Not forward. Not backward. Kind of up and down. I sat there for a minute, slowly registering that the movement of the car was not just me being wasted, but because of something actual that was happening outside my miserable head.

  Yes, it was starting to bounce up and down, ever so slightly. It was like the car was trying to seduce the ground it was parked on, lowering its rear half teasingly before whipping it back up, then repeating the action again. I got up from the bumper and slowly turned around, then leaned over to see if I could make out anything through the rear window. The palm of a hand suddenly slapped against the window from the inside, then snapped back into the darkness. I leaned in closer, because damn if that wasn’t scary and alluring at the same time. I squinted to see inside and all of a sudden realized what I was looking at: Sarah’s upside-down face. Yes, that was Sarah, on her back, in the backseat, with her eyes closed, getting plowed mightily by some dude on top of her who hadn’t even had the decency to take his shirt off.

  I backed away and crouched down a few cars over, continuing to watch the car bounce up and down, up and down, up and down. It bounced faster and faster and faster, just going to town on that grassy knoll, which was surely now turning to a desperate and sweaty mound of mud. Finally the car came, shivering, to a halt. I weakly stood and wafted back to the party, hoping against hope that the trench coat guy and his friends had either left or gotten so high that my little indiscretion would just be a cloudy memory that they couldn’t really recall through the wildfire of weed smoke burning up their frontal cortexes.

  I saw a couple of shadowy people walking toward me and feared the worst. But then I saw a big parabola head and realized it was just Heather and Jennifer.

  “Hey, you ready to find Sarah and hit turbo?” Heather said.

  Yeah, she was probably zipping up and finding her car keys as we spoke.

  I looked around everywhere for the trench coat guy, but he was gone. My heartbeat settled down a little at the thought that maybe nobody had seen my scandalous crotch-grab. Perhaps I was in the clear.

  “Where’s my Boone’s Farm bottle?” came a shrieking voice from the direction of the house. Looking over, I saw the blurry figure of mohawk girl, standing on the porch in her bra and underwear, holding up her bottle of Boone’s Farm in the air lik
e it was a tomahawk. Yeah, it was time to go.

  We somehow all got back to Sarah’s house and crashed on various pieces of furniture down in her parents’ basement. I woke up the next morning feeling raw and sticky, the sinfully high amount of sugar in my blood lowering my life expectancy by the minute. I stood up from the La-Z-Boy I’d passed out on and swayed as I tried to stop the floor from moving out of sheer willpower. Hobbling over to the staircase, I steadied myself with the railing, and slowly padded up the carpeted stairs leading up to the kitchen.

  I immediately gagged after stepping onto the linoleum. It was a very small kitchen, and there was no avoiding the horrific diorama on the table: a half-eaten Big Mac, a scattering of fries, and a hot fudge sundae container on its side that had spilled its contents onto the Big Mac wrapper. I didn’t remember a trip to McDonald’s, but I guess it happened.

  I sat down at the table, grabbed my backpack, and took out my insulin vial and a syringe. I wasn’t even going to test my blood sugar, because it would probably break the machine. I drew out ten units and jabbed myself in the stomach, all the while trying to think of what awful thing had happened the night before. I knew it was rotten, knew I had done something incredibly dumb and life-threatening, but what the heck was it? I looked at the revolting burger in front of me, visible teeth marks and all. I picked it up, turned it around to the unbitten side, and shrugged.

  Well, whatever it was, I assumed I’d gotten away with it. I took a bite of the burger, then went and threw up.

  It wasn’t until Monday that I remembered in a flash the humiliating thing I did at the party. I walked into homeroom that morning, still delicate from the weekend’s activities, and slumped into my chair. After a few minutes I lifted my head up, and there was Kathleen, her hair looking admirably gravity-defying for a Monday morning.

  “Have fun at the party?” she murmured, visibly stoned.