Sweet Tooth

by Tim Anderson

  We walked into the living room, where my dad sat in his La-Z-Boy watching Larry King on CNN. Mom washed dishes up in the kitchen.

  “Hello!” I said, as Dani shyly walked behind me, smiling and nodding hello.

  “Mom, Dad, this is Dani,” I bellowed and gestured toward Dani, as if I were Vanna White.

  “Hi!” Mom said, reaching a hand out from her dishtowel to shake Dani’s. “Honey, you are gorgeous!”

  “Oh, thank you,” Dani said, thrilled by the compliment. I quickly realized: I hadn’t even told Dani how good she looked. Not once did I shower her with empty but well-meant flattery. What a fraud I was.

  Dad shook her hand, too. “Has anybody ever told you that you look like Geena Davis?” he said. Oh, he was good.

  “Actually, no, I’ve never heard that, but thank you, that’s quite a compliment!” My parents were wooing her better than I ever could.

  “Oh my gosh, you really do,” I said, trying to piggyback on my dad’s line. “Beetlejuice!”

  Mom asked the obligatory questions about Dani’s family and chitchatted for a few minutes before she and Dad made themselves scarce and went upstairs to leave us in peace.

  What on earth were we going to do down here? I HAD NO IDEA.

  “Is this you?” Dani asked, pointing at a picture in the framed collection of photographs on the wall. Every year Dad always collected the best family photographs of the year and made a collage of them to give to Mom for Christmas. This one was from 1972, the year I was born.

  “Yep, that’s me. I was obviously more of a jock back then.”

  The picture showed me as a little blobby baby, the shape of an egg, wearing a sweatshirt with a picture of a football on it. The only time in my life I ever wore such a thing.

  “You were a fat baby!”

  “Yeah, the fattest one in the family.”

  It was then that I knew what we should do: look at photo albums! What beautiful young lady out on a first date wouldn’t want to sit next to her suitor and peruse page after page after page of family photographs? Trips to Kerr Lake, trips to Disneyland, Thanksgiving dinner at Grandma Ruby’s, Christmas morning in our pajamas, it was all there for the seeing. Somehow Dani managed not to melt into the carpet at my suggestion.

  My parents were dedicated family photo scrapbookers, and the bookshelf in the living room was lined with them. I picked a few off the shelf and joined Dani on the couch. That’s right, I said I picked a few off the shelf.

  Dani faked interest in our family albums like a true champion, remarking on many of the photos we looked at (“Oh, I loved It’s a Small World!” “That looks like a really great Thanksgiving spread!” “Did you catch any fish?” “A baby alligator, really?”) and generally indulging my need to tell embarrassing family stories, like the time my mom accidentally got so drunk on screwdrivers on my uncle’s boat in Florida (“I couldn’t taste the vodka!”) that she threw up over the side, then fell in the water.

  “We should get her to tell us that story,” Dani said. Seriously? I thought. ’Cause we could do that.

  Dani was too indulgent. Her agreeable reaction to the terrible photo album slide show lulled me into a false sense that hey, I was killing it. This was a slam-dunk. She was enjoying herself. She was satisfied. There was nothing she’d rather be doing on this couch at this very moment than flipping through multiple books of pictures of my family members blowing out birthday candles, posing with the Easter Bunny, and dancing with mops.

  Which I guess is why I decided it would be a good idea to show Dani my Snoopy doll. I did what? Yes, flipping through the photos, we came across a picture of me as a five-year-old holding a brand-new stuffed Snoopy. How I loved that Snoopy when I was a boy. Loved him so deeply. Slept with him every night. Dressed him in different outfits.

  “Oh, that’s a cute one of yo—”

  “I still have that Snoopy!” I couldn’t help myself. As Dani sat on the couch with wide eyes that I mistook for genuine curiosity, not dread, I went over to the closet where I had a shelf of items from my boyhood, and took him out. He was still dressed in his red nightgown, his white fur discolored from the years of being boy-handled.

  I brought Snoopy over to Dani and introduced them. She took him from me and gave him the once-over, looking like she wanted to ask him for a ride home.

  “I still have all of his outfits! There’s a disco one and an Uncle Sam one and an airline pilot one, and…”

  “A disco outfit, huh?” she said. “That’s pretty hot.”

  All of a sudden, all became perfectly clear. I realized—observing Dani’s expression of mild concern—that the date had kind of gone off the rails, and not in a good way. In a weird way. It could have been weirder, sure. Like if I had decided to put on one of my mother’s dresses and start reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the hydrangeas over in the corner. But just because it could have been weirder didn’t mean it wasn’t already weird enough.

  “Um, it’s, like, nine thirty, and my curfew is at ten, so I kind of need to go,” Dani said, leaning her head to the side to soften the blow. She probably wanted to nip this thing in the bud before I got out my full collection of paper dolls and my sister’s Holly Hobbie house and demand that she and Snoopy join us for a tea party. In any case, my flailing attempts to do ANYTHING with Dani on that couch but make out with her had gotten ridiculous, and Dani, bless her, knew when a thing was not going to happen. (She also knew, at this point, that she didn’t really want a thing to happen.)

  I awkwardly put my Snoopy back into the closet (that damn closet) and collected the photo albums and stacked them back on the shelf, as Dani visited the bathroom and probably laughed until she cried and then said “What?” to herself a lot while staring at her reflection in the mirror.

  I drove her home and walked her to the door. It was apparent to both of us that there shouldn’t be a kiss, there really really shouldn’t. Still, a trace of awkward will-we-or-won’t-we uncertainty remained as we said good-bye on the porch. The front door was open, and through the storm door we could see Ashley on the floor of the living room watching TV. She waved. We were both relieved that she was there, because that meant it was too late to steal a kiss.

  “Thanks a lot, I had a great time,” Dani said with a perfectly straight face.

  “Yeah, we should do this again,” I said perfunctorily.

  “Oh yeah, totally, awesome, yeah,” Dani concurred. We hugged briefly, and she walked inside.

  I walked back to my Plymouth and turned on the car. “What on earth, Tim?” I asked myself. In a few short months, Dani and I would see each other again at a party, bond as we took shots of Jack Daniel’s, and quickly become lifelong friends. In a few short months we would go to a Mojo Nixon concert in Chapel Hill, and I would be schooled by Mr. Nixon on how a real man treats the ladies—in this case, he jumps off the stage and cuts a flirty hillbilly circle around Dani while singing “Stuffin’ Martha’s Muffin.” But that was later. Right now, in the aftermath of our date, I felt I’d been found out to be a huge weirdo. This night had been, oh, what’s the word?

  “Fiasco,” I said to myself, fixing my curly bangs in the rearview mirror with one hand as I shoved the cassette into the stereo with the other. The first strains of The Smiths’ “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” escaped from the car speakers, and I turned it up. What do you think, Morrissey?

  He crooned that I should park the car at the side of the road.

  “Yeah, I’ve done that already,” I said. “Then what?”

  Slow like syrup, he emotes a few more notes. Ugh, get to the point, Morrissey.

  Morrissey then gets to the point: Apparently, time’s tide will smother me. Thanks, Moz! Anyway, yeah, total fiasco.

  Also, Jesus might not be real.

  Raleigh’s Shelley Lake Park is, during the day, a manmade pastoral wonderland of hikers, bicyclists, picnickers, skateboarders, Frisbee throwers, paddleboaters, soccer players, and sunbathers of every size and description. A place where f
amilies go to frolic, where couples go to hold hands and perhaps give each other innocent pecks on the cheek, and where dogs go to chase things and whiz on trees.

  When the sun goes down, though, Shelley Lake turns into a rotten, sulfurous underworld of sin and debauchery, a ghastly hellscape where sordid fornicators, uncouth youths, and drug smokers gather to bow down to their demonic idols, swear everlasting oaths to their fiery protectors, and huddle within the acrid purple dry ice of the dead to tug on joints and pass them around like a bunch of giggly retarded gargoyles.

  Take, for example, the gaggle of teenage idiots clustered around this picnic table in the heart of the park. A serpentine trail of smoke cuts through the night sky above them, a sinister, immaculate trail punctured only by the coughing of the guy with the hilarious curly bangs.

  “You OK, Tim?” his lady friend Dani, in the flannel shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots, asks him. Marcus and JJ, the other two in the group, who appear to not have showered since before their last Metallica concert, look on, giggling.

  “Yep. Yep, I’m fine,” the young man answers, lying through his braces. Because he’s not fine, though he doesn’t really know it yet. Sure, he feels soft and spongy, and his brain is enjoying an exhilarating ride on the Tetrahydrocannabinol Train, but the THC he’s been sucking into his clammy adolescent body is quite strong—the boy keeps seeing the face of the scary clown from Poltergeist in the clouds. The evil weed is also masking the fact that his blood sugar level is nose-diving to a dangerously low number. The preventative signals his body usually gives him that danger is lurking—confusion, perspiration, tingling fingers, inability to communicate effectively—are easily ignored by both him and his degenerate friends as they descend into a murky swirl of psychedelic dreamscaping. Yes, that pot was laced with some terrible bullshit.

  “Wow, it’s…” the young boy comments before losing his train of thought and bending over in an embarrassing fit of feminine giggling.

  “Dude, he’s, like,…” JJ starts to say before forgetting what he was going to say.

  “Fucked up?” Marcus finishes for him.

  “That sounds right,” Dani declares.

  All four of them are overtaken by the compulsion to laugh. Just laugh it all out. Laugh at the way the trees look like Smurf heads against the sky, laugh at the very concept of a picnic table, laugh at the thought of Marcus going into a life of politics, laugh at Dani being in a band and refusing to play tambourine, laugh at the boy and his crusty hair.

  “Wow, I think there was something in that stuff,” Dani says after taking a breath from all the laughing and inhaling a clump of her hair. She’s thankfully talking some sense. “Who’d you get this from? I feel like a laser beam.”

  “You what? I what? He what?” the young diabetic says before shouting “Ahhhhh!” He looks at the sky again. The evil clown face is gone now.

  “I got it from Jeremy,” Marcus explains. “You know him. He’s got a…car.”

  “Yeah, yeah, dude,” JJ says. “I’ve been in Jeremy’s car. Like, in it.”

  The young boy is now sitting down on the ground picking up blades of grass and tickling his ear with them. He starts sniffing them.

  “Tim, you OK?” Dani says. Someone needs to give this young lady a citizenship award.

  “I’m…you know…um,” he responds.

  Dani continues to look at him, crouched on the ground. “Tim? Tim?”

  The boy lets out a snort, then wipes his nose with his muddy hand. He stands up, and Dani gets a good look at him. It looks like a squirrel has just taken a whiz on his face. She leans forward and, in the glow of the moonlight, gets a glimpse of his glassy eyes.

  “Uh-oh, I think he’s low,” Dani says. “C’mon, Marcus, we need to get to the store. He needs sugar.”

  “What, it’s a diabetes thing?” JJ asks.

  “Yeah, he’s got to have some sugar. Tim? Tim! Do you have any sugar on you?”

  He lifts up his hand and opens it to show Dani the blades of grass he’s been holding.

  “OK, that doesn’t do much for us, Tim. We’ve got to go to the store. I’ve got the munchies anyway. Who wants doughnuts? ’Cause I fucking do.”

  “Yeah, dude, doughnuts, yeah, what?” JJ says, even though his blood sugar is fine.

  The four Musketeers, stoned as sea cucumbers, wade through the darkness, finally arriving at the parking lot and Marcus’s Mazda. From a distance, you would be hard-pressed to point out which one of them is currently in the throes of an epic blood sugar plunge; they all look like zombies, hungry for brains and Hostess CupCakes.

  They get in the car and Marcus drives them with all due haste to Sav-A-Center, the closest grocery store. Dani gets out of the front seat and helps the young marionette out of the back. She walks with him to the entrance as if she were escorting her grandmother to the early bird dinner at the K&W Cafeteria.

  Dani’s been through this drill before—being out somewhere with the boy at a rock show or a party or the Starcade and seeing his face go blank and clammy, then having to rush out and get him something from the DJ Cinnamon’s Bakery or the Fast Fare or the Food Lion before he collapses onto the floor because, dammit, he never brings any freaking sugar out with him.

  So Dani was prepared to walk the grocery aisles with her friend, only worried that he not enter the Vortex of Indecision she knows he’s prone to falling into when they’re wandering in the land of Way Too Many Choices.

  The boy’s eyes expand as he enters the wide-screen Technicolor Land of Oz that is the Sav-A-Center. He pivots left, knowing full well in which direction the bakery resides. He now stands at the edge of a yellow brick road that leads directly up to the pastry case against the far wall.

  “Ahhhhhh, look at all the glorious pastries!” the boy exclaims, the first full sentence he has uttered in about an hour.

  “They are pretty good lookin’,” Dani agrees as they march onward to the case. Dani turns her head around to see if Marcus and JJ are nearby. They are both thumbing through magazines at the racks back by the checkout lines. She turns back around, only to see that the diabetic slob she arrived with has disappeared.

  Ice cream aisle, she knows instinctively. She scurries to the frozen foods section, and, sure enough, sees the boy clumsily stuffing into his gaping mouth a Klondike bar he has pulled out of a box.

  She walks up to him and takes the torn box out of his hands, looks around, and puts it back in the freezer. While she’s doing this, he’s already moved on to a box of frozen Butterfinger ice cream bars. Judging from the way he’s messily shoving one of them into his mouth, they are wonderfully edible.

  “OK, Tim, you have to stop doing that,” Dani says, taking the Butterfinger box out of his hand and hiding it under a stack of other ice cream bars. He stumbles and upsets a stack of ice cream sandwiches, and they come crashing down, flopping out onto the floor just as Dani finishes saying, “Let’s go get some doughnuts or something.”

  The boy sets off, dashing over toward the forgotten pastry case and leaving his friend to pick up the pieces in the frozen food section behind him. He turns and glides along the floor of the cereal aisle, his bright eyes taking in all of the delicious options—Lucky Charms, Cookie Crisp, Apple Jacks. If only he had a bowl of milk handy. He turns right at the end of the aisle, looks down, and sees that somehow he has a Hostess cherry pie, a bag of Hershey’s Kisses, and a Little Debbie Star Crunch in his hands. He shrugs and soldiers on until, finally, he comes face to face with the glass pastry case of his dreams.

  He presses his nose against the glass and takes it all in: There are bear claws, cream cheese Danishes, Boston cream–filled doughnuts, regular glazed, chocolate glazed, chocolate cream-filled, oh, it is all there and more. But now he must decide—how many, and which ones?—and, dear baby Jesus, that is the last thing he is equipped to do.

  By the grace of God, Dani is there to save the day. She trots up to the case, nudges him to the side, takes a white paper bag from the stack, grabs the tong
s, and starts putting pastries in the bag.

  “OK, I think we have enough, Tim,” she says after filling the bag to capacity. She guides him back toward the checkout stand, where Marcus and JJ are still flipping through their trashy supermarket tabloids and learning about Elizabeth Taylor’s latest marriage, to Michael Jackson’s chimpanzee.

  The sugared-up supercouple make their way up to the checkout. Dani takes all of the items out of the boy’s hands and places them on the conveyor belt. The unfortunate young cashier begins ringing him up, the poor thing.

  “That’s $8.79,” she says, expecting a normal human response.

  The boy pulls some crumpled paper out of the pocket of his unnecessarily tight corduroys. There’s a dollar bill, a school note, and an empty and sticky Klondike bar wrapper. He offers all of these to the nice cashier, who narrows her eyes and looks at Dani for a lifeline.

  “Sorry, he’s diabetic,” she says, then turns to her friend. “Tim,” she says in crisp, clear English, “give me your wallet.”

  Still able to respond to emphatically delivered demands, he squeezes his billfold out of his cords and hands it over. Dani pulls more dollar bills out and hands them to the cashier as the boy licks Klondike ice cream off his hands.

  “OK, guys,” Dani says to Marcus and JJ, who now are fully up to date with Donna Rice’s diet secrets. The kids all leave the Sav-A-Center and walk back to the car, many many pastries in their possession and probably only a few items stolen.

  Did the manic scramble to get to the Sav-A-Center and the bright fluorescent lights of the store kill their buzz? Never mind. Marcus has another joint in his glove compartment. So it’s back to the moral vacuum that is Shelley Lake at night, where they can stay for a while, because now they have snacks.

  For now, at least. There’s a boy in the backseat eating one of the cream-filled doughnuts, and he will soon move onto the bear claw. And he’s not really in a sharing mood.