Sweet Tooth

by Tim Anderson

  CHAPTER 6

  There comes a time in every person’s life when he encounters electrifying things he never knew existed before, and he excitedly engages in the blissful process of adapting this new information into his understanding of the world around him and realizes that he can never go back to the boring and lifeless days of yore. Like when Britney Spears discovered Daisy Dukes and pole dancing, or Rush Limbaugh found out about bacon and spittle.

  At the squeaky age of sixteen, I landed a job at a bakery/used bookstore that, after a rocky start, ended up becoming surely the best job I would ever have. It opened up brave new worlds for me, worlds that hinted at the wild and wonderful universe that was out there for the taking once you got beyond the straitjacket of your own mega-normal upbringing. It also had the added benefit of providing easy access to lots and lots of homemade cookies, cakes, pastries, and other fine baked goods.

  The bakery was called the Coterie, and it sat in Greystone Village Shopping Center in North Raleigh between a surf shop and a dog-grooming salon. It was run by an ex-hippy named Will who spent some time in Canada and jail during the Vietnam War and these days spent as much time as possible golfing. So already he was the type of human I’d never encountered in my life, and someone my parents weren’t sure they really approved of. Laurie had worked there before me, but when she quit her senior year, she told me that she would talk to Will about hiring me to replace her. One evening, she came into my room to tell me the great news.

  I was on my bed reading, toggling between Stephen King’s It and a diabetes pamphlet Mom had picked up at the pharmacy and forced upon me when she got home. Both were horrifying, so whenever one of them became too much for me, I would put it down and pick up the other. It, of course, featured a murderous clown who loved to eat children, and the diabetes pamphlet covered in explicit detail all the possible complications that could arise later in life for a young diabetic who didn’t take care of himself: glaucoma, cataracts, foot infections and disorders, hypertension, heart disease, impotence (what’s that?), nerve damage, and amputation. And, obviously, depression.

  People with diabetes are far more likely to have a foot or leg amputated than other people. The problem? Many people with diabetes have artery disease, which reduces blood flow to the feet. Also, many people with diabetes have nerve disease, which reduces sensation. Together, these problems make it easy to get ulcers and infections that may lead to amputation.

  So if I’m not careful, I could lose a foot. Duly noted. But could this pamphlet possibly drive this point home with some useful visuals so that I’d be under no illusions that feet problems are at all attractive? Why, yes, it could. I shuddered and dry-heaved a little when I saw a giant photograph that showed a real live ulcer on the underside of some poor tramp’s swollen, diseased foot. Good Lord. The ulcer was the size of a fifty-cent piece, it was the color of zombie blood, it had flecks of scabby pus along its periphery, and it was surrounded by yellowy, cracked skin that appeared ready to cede its territory to the expanding ulcer at the earliest opportunity.

  Breathlessly I put the pamphlet down and picked It back up, needing a little palate cleanse. I’d had my fill of the American Medical Association’s diabetes horror show and felt the need to turn to some lighter material, say about Pennywise the clown going medieval on some Vermont schoolchildren. Then I thought maybe I should just, you know, check my feet real quick. Mom was always going on about how I needed to take care of my feet, and I usually just ignored her, but there was no ignoring the photo I’d just seen. Perhaps I should just have a look, give them the once-over, you know, just to make sure my feet haven’t been eaten alive yet by the pus-seeping ulcer monster.

  I sat up and swung my legs over the bed and onto the floor. I lifted up one foot to the opposite knee and examined the underside: It was supple and pristine, like a newborn baby diabetic’s bottom. But wait, what’s that tiny pinprick of discoloration? It’s…blue, yes, it’s blue. What might it be? Hmm. Maybe the subepidermal glow of an ulcer fetus that will soon explode through my foot like a hungry alien?

  “Hey, Tim,” Laurie said as she poked her head into my room.

  I gasped audibly and turned to her.

  “I talked to Will about you, and he said to come by this week to talk about the job.”

  “Cool, thanks,” I said.

  “What’s that?” She pointed at the diabetes pamphlet featuring photos of outtakes from John Carpenter’s The Thing.

  “Oh, this?” I said, picking it up. “It’s just, you know, a new Stephen King diabetes pamphlet I’ve been reading. Did you know that my feet are going to eventually look like two little Elephant Man twins?”

  Laurie’s eyes narrowed. “Hmmmm. No, that’s probably a worst-case scenario.”

  She was probably right. Anyway, I could easily get hit by a bus before that happened. In the meantime, I was excited at the prospect of having a hip new job. I needed this change of scenery. After my hilarious foray back into high school dating, I had a few more girlfriends, and things predictably didn’t work out. With poor Lisa, whom I started seeing a few months after my date with Dani/destiny, it was because we were always exasperatedly yelling at each other—a trend I continued even after we’d broken up and Lisa had matured, stopped yelling, and moved on to other, much better-looking dudes. I just couldn’t stop yelling at her whenever I saw her. In the hallways, in the school parking lot, at a party, at the Taco Bell. Yelling at Lisa became my thing, and I couldn’t give it up. Sample argument, while I was driving us to some rock show or other during happier times:

  Me: You don’t like The Primitives? What’s wrong with you?

  Lisa: I don’t know, I just don’t like them.

  Me: Have you listened to their album? Do you know their songs? “Stop Killing Me”? “Spacehead”? “Way Behind Me”? Are you deaf?

  Lisa: I just…I just don’t like them, I don’t know.

  Me: But you like Jesus and Mary Chain! You like Blondie, don’t you? You like the Buzzcocks! And The Smiths! What do you have against The Primitives?

  Lisa: Nothing! Nothing, Tim, I just don’t really care for their music! It doesn’t appeal to me! It’s just not my thing!

  Me: Why?!

  Lisa: I think they’re kind of boring!

  Me: God, I can’t believe you said that, you are such a bitch!

  I was an angry, angry little hobbit, and angry hobbits yell at ex-girlfriends because they are also often secretly gay little hobbits. (I’m so sorry, Lisa.)

  With Zoe, my next, extremely short-lived girlfriend, things didn’t work out mainly because I think she couldn’t shake the idea that there was some problem with our chemistry. Can’t imagine what it was. But when it came to the romance, things were just not happening, even though she was a stunning beauty with alabaster skin, full red lips, and an award-worthy wardrobe of secondhand French dresses. When we kissed for the first time, it was soft, sweet, and, for me at least, a little too wet. After the kiss she looked at me with narrowed eyes and tilted her head slightly, as if she just couldn’t put her finger on something. Something missing. She would proceed to do this after every kiss.

  “What is it, the thing that is missing?” she always appeared to be asking herself as she looked at me in the pale afterglow of our passionless liplock. Our hangout sessions went on for a few months until we finally just evaporated into a puff of sexless smoke in her living room, like the dry ice at a Bauhaus concert. No, that’s too sexy. Like the dry ice at a Peter Cetera concert.

  So I would be leaving my great job at the drugstore, where I had access to any and all Hershey products I could ever possibly stuff into my greasy face (under the necessary circumstances, of course), and trade that for a new job at a bakery where the selection of suicidal sweets would be epic. I looked back down at my foot, and at the suspicious blue mark on the underside that might possibly one day explode with bloodred lava and gooey pus. I rubbed the mark with my thumb, and it disappeared. Oh. Probably not an ulcer, I guess. Yeah, a pen
mark. It was a pen mark.

  I laid back and picked It back up, able to comfortably settle back in to this tale of fantastical child murder now that I was sure that my feet wouldn’t need to be lopped off, for today at least.

  One might think that a bakery would be one of the worst places for a newly diabetic teenager to be working, especially one with a fearsome sweet tooth and a particular weakness for salmonella-rific delights like cookie dough and cake icing. Sure, I can see your point. But consider this: It was also one of the best, because since I was still in the throes of the honeymoon period—which, unlike real honeymoons, can last up to a few years—my blood sugar level was always threatening to plummet at any given moment if I wasn’t super-vigilant of what my levels were (which I wasn’t). It had quickly become my biggest fear that I would find myself somewhere—a desert island, a campsite, the boiler room of a naval vessel—with plunging blood sugar and no Double Stuf Oreos to combat it. So it was always best to err on the side of deliciousness.

  I went into the shop one Saturday soon after my powwow with Laurie and met Will, because I wouldn’t just get the job without a thorough examination of my credentials, obviously. That just isn’t how things work in our merit-based system of nepotism and crony capitalism, come on. This is America.

  I walked in during the early Saturday morning rush, and the place was buzzing. Folks, most of them at least middle-aged, sat at little circular tables drinking coffee, chatting, and munching on their sweet and/or savory breakfast goodies. Many tables were taken up by older couples who didn’t have the good sense to sleep in on a Saturday morning. At one table sat two men, both looking to be in their sixties. One of them was bearded and grumpy-looking, and his name was probably Leopold; the other was the pretty one: He was clean-shaven, tanned, and he wore short white tennis shorts and a white T-shirt, against which his pectoral and arm muscles pressed with admirable persistence.

  The shop smelled unbelievably delicious, a mixture of fresh-baked muffins, coffee, cakes, burnt cheese, and used books. NPR’s Weekend Edition program played on the speakers, and books lined the walls of the place, hardcovers and paperbacks great and small. On a shelf by the front windows sat copies of the New York Times, Barron’s, the New York Review of Books, and the Village Voice. I’d heard of all of these but had never seen them face-to-face, much less cracked the pages of any one of them. Mine was a Saturday Evening Post kind of family. The most explosively liberal publication we consumed was the News and Observer, Raleigh’s daily newspaper that we got every morning in spite of the fact that it had, in my mother’s opinion, a terrible liberal bent, as evidenced by the endless stream of unflattering photos of Jesse Helms it was always running. (These were very funny photos.) In short, this was the most highfalutin establishment I’d ever stepped into. I could feel myself getting smarter and more insufferably smug the longer I gazed at the covers of these new elitist publications before me, not to mention the shelf upon shelf of books—Godless novels by the likes of Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and some guy with the unlikely name of Truman Capote. Imagine what I’d be like after a few months in this joint.

  Will was a big, burly guy with a full head of graying hair and a wonderfully bushy and equally graying moustache. He stood behind the counter in a white apron cutting up vegetables for the soup of the day. He looked me over, asked if I could work weekends, noticed my ridiculous/impressive curly bangs swooping down into my face like a weeping willow, and said, “OK, start next Saturday morning, but you’ll have to keep that hair out of your face somehow.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said, having no idea how on earth I was going to accomplish that. There was nowhere else for my luxurious bangs to go but down into my face, really, cascading over my forehead in tight curlicues, and often swirling directly into my eyeballs. These hair shoots were a force of nature, and they could only be tamed by lots and lots of mousse. They were also a major part of my public persona—I was known for them, like Ayn Rand was known for her boobs or Jayne Mansfield was famous for her fountainheads. Many of the black kids at school referred to them as “Jheri curls” and complimented me on them quite frequently, not always with sarcasm. I supposed I could tease them over to the side by using extra mousse and maybe some Aqua Net, but the very idea of doing that felt like selling out. Anyway, I figured I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.

  I would be a counter worker, waiting on customers, making sandwiches, making and pouring coffee, cleaning and busing tables, and, restocking sodas, beers, and cookies. I arrived at eight a.m. the next Saturday wearing my best vest and my shiniest patent leather shoes, and there was Will behind the counter chatting with a customer about his golf game. The same regulars sat at their tables around the shop, including the gay couple. It was the first day of the rest of my life.

  I had managed to stretch my curly bangs to the side of my head, gather them into one big swirly clump at the end with the assistance of gobs of mousse, and hook them around my right ear. Not all of them could make the journey; the ones on the left couldn’t stretch far enough, so I just tucked them up under the others and hoped for the best.

  I went around behind the counter, and Will stopped his conversation to say hello. He looked at my hair and tilted his head, trying to make sense of it. He then looked at my outfit and probably wondered why I was wearing my sister’s clothes.

  “How you doing?” he said.

  “Good, good,” I said. As Will turned to wash his hands, a tendril of hair popped out from behind my ear, bouncing and dangling in front of my eye. I quickly stretched it back and hooked it again, then pretended it never happened when he turned back to me and wiped his hands on his apron.

  “OK, let’s show you all about where the magic happens,” he said, clapping his hands together and walking down the narrow area behind the counter to where the glass cases holding the pastries and cookies stood on both sides of the corner register.

  “Pastries and breakfast stuff is here,” he said, gesturing to the case on the left. “The prices are in the front of the tray, but you’ll learn them soon enough. Over here are the cookies. We bake a bunch in the morning and just keep ’em stocked up all day.”

  The pastry case was a flakey, aromatic utopia. Everything you could ever want was there: cream cheese Danishes, blueberry and cream cheese Danishes, croissants, ham-and-cheese croissants, bear claws, cheese straws, banana nut muffins, chocolate muffins, blueberry muffins, carrot raisin muffins, strawberry croissants, EVERYTHING. And just when I thought that this heaven I’d entered couldn’t get any more scrumptiously obscene, I stepped over to the cookie case, and my knees buckled. Many of the cookies were nearly the size of Belgian waffles. There were deluxe chocolate chip, chocolate chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, chocolate chip shortbread, peanut butter, peanut butter chocolate chip. I never wanted to come up for air. I was home.

  Will took me into the back where the large ovens and the racks of newly baked cookies were. He had a row of large plastic containers out on the counter space, where he was doing what was called “setups” for the next morning’s muffin baking: basically mixing together all the dry ingredients for each muffin so that all he had to do the next morning was toss in some milk, butter, and eggs, mix, and put the trays into the oven.

  Around the corner was Leslie, the cake decorator, who came in mornings to work on the custom cake orders for the day. The one she was working on at the time was a big sheet cake with a picture of Chip ’n’ Dale, the Disney chipmunks, in the center. Both looked delicious.

  We walked back out to the front, and soon enough I was having a go at helping folks, ringing them up, refilling their coffees, and eyeing their Danishes as they took them away to their tables. Every time I bent down I rewrapped my bangs around my ear lest they pop out with a boing and unleash pandemonium in the bakery.

  I quickly began to feel as if the regular Saturday morning customers didn’t know what to make of this gangly new thing with the sticky hair and the ugly brown pants and the Siouxsie T-shirt underneath hi
s sister’s vest. When they came up to order something from me, they approached me cautiously, intermittently looking over at Will with mild discomfort, as if they didn’t want to agitate the unsightly young vampire who should probably be asleep in his black-lit coffin rather than serving the early birds of the upper middle class Greystone Village cohort. I felt on display in a way that I hadn’t been as a cashier at Kerr Drug. Maybe because this place had a hint of class, refinement, and exclusivity that Kerr Drug, which any old hobo might enter to buy cigarettes and suppositories, completely lacked. I felt a little out of my league. I mean, I didn’t even know you could mix cream cheese with blueberries in a Danish. And who knew you could put carrots in a muffin? The most highfalutin thing I’d ever done with carrots was dip them in ranch dressing, at a cookout.

  After about an hour, Will called me over to the sandwich station to give me a tutorial. He showed me the sandwich menu and gave me an overview of the fundamentals of Coterie sandwich making: Mayonnaise should go on the bread, mustard should go on the meat; if it’s a vegetarian sandwich, the mustard should go on the cheese. There was a convection oven if folks wanted their sandwich hot, but that shouldn’t really be encouraged because it holds up the line; it was mainly for the Reuben. Then Will got out a small spiral-bound notepad and opened it up.

  “Here’s the instructions. It has all the sandwiches, and it’s pretty much a no-brainer. They’re all pretty easy.”

  Easy for him to say. He knew what a Reuben was.

  “You’ll be making sandwiches during the lunch rush today, and I’ll be out here taking orders.”

  I looked through the list and figured I could handle this OK. Slap some specified meat on some specified bread with some specified condiments and vegetables, and serve it up. The Reuben presented a bit of a curveball, but I figured it would just be a variation on the above, plus Thousand Island and sauerkraut, whatever that was.