Sweet Tooth

by Tim Anderson

  Our favorite dingbat diabetic is really getting cocky. Just strolling around town with his dumb new hairstyle, feeding his face with all sorts of nonsense he knows he shouldn’t be eating, then feeling guilty and taking extra insulin to try to stabilize himself, which is just a bad idea that we all know will only lead one day to hyperinsulinism. And who is paying for that extra insulin that he is so cavalierly squeezing into his dermis like so much smack? The British public, that’s who. Yes, over the months our boy has gotten used to the joys of socialized medicine, and he’s taking it for everything it’s worth.

  So he stuffed a Double Decker down his throat and then guiltily ducked into a restroom, whipped out a needle, and stabbed himself with more insulin to atone for the grievous sin. Alas, he overdosed himself, so it was only a matter of time before his blood sugar plummeted and he turned into the Sweaty Twitch Monster once again.

  And now here he is, a couple of hours later, at Piccadilly Records in Manchester’s city center, sweating up a storm, thumbing through the CDs, and holding on to a Jesus and Mary Chain LP like his life depended on it. Sweat gathers on his face, and he attempts to wipe it away with his clammy hand, a useless gesture if there ever was one.

  “Excuse me,” some young buck with a moptop covering his eyes says to our hero’s face in slow motion as he tries to slide past and join the queue of fanboys at the back of the shop snaking past the registers and stretching almost to the door. All the fanboys are holding copies of an album called Pablo Honey like brainwashed toddlers, and for what? To meet the assemblage of revoltingly skinny and pale young men who made that album and who are currently sitting at a table offering their signatures, that’s what. So whysoever does our hero have no idea this is going on around him? Probably because his floundering synapses are too busy trying to communicate to his brain that he doesn’t have enough money to purchase more than one album because, though Britain is a place of socialized medicine, it is not yet a place of socialized New Wave post-punk synth-washed indie guitar pop.

  So who are these malnourished gremlins who are offering up to the frozen youths of today their over-coveted autographs, then? “Radiohead in-store appearance,” the sign says. Radiohead, huh? Doesn’t ring a bell. Oh, look at that, though. Our young hero appears to have a thought in his head: “Wait, I know Radiohead,” his sebaceous face appears to be saying. “They sing that song ‘Creep.’ I hate that song.”

  So he hates this band’s most famous song. Is that why he’s joined the queue? Must be. They’re famous and skinny, so they’re obviously worth meeting, even when it would make much more sense for him to go down to the corner shop and get some orange juice or something before he falls over. The line moves quickly, and our boy struggles to find something he can get the band members’ bony British twig fingers to sign. He’s got nothing, and he’s not about to buy their album because, again, he hates that song. Finally, he realizes he’s got his literature notebook in his backpack. Amazing that his brain was even able to remember he owned a backpack, much less that he had it on his back.

  He pulls out the red notebook as he approaches the table. The first man in black is a smiley bloke named Colin. He moves his mouth and says something pleasant-seeming, but our hero doesn’t understand a word. He proffers his notebook, uttering the only two words he can currently assemble—“literature notebook”—and Colin offers his signature, then passes the notebook along. The next degenerate at the table has Mick Jagger lips and cheeks so hollow you could serve oatmeal in them. He curls his massive lips into a smile, unfurls his Gollum-like fingers to take possession of the notebook, and scrawls onto it his name in his unreadable chicken scratch. He then passes along the notebook to the next guy, and all the while King Clammy Hands just drifts down the table watching as his notebook is manhandled (the word “man” being employed here in the broadest possible sense) in turn by the bald one, and then the dreamy one.

  Finally, finally, the notebook arrives into the hands of the lead singer, whose hair is doing the best ’70s Rod Stewart impression we have ever seen. He smiles (the word “smile” being employed here in the broadest possible sense) and flashes a mouthful of teeth, all of which are seemingly staking out a claim to the same patch of gum. This smile appears to frighten our hero, who isn’t sure how to process such a traditionally pleasant but, in this case, threatening-seeming facial gesture. The singer takes his Magic Marker in hand and executes his signature with an artistic flourish, then our hero thanks all the Radioheads with a completely nonsensical series of words that only his maker, if he is listening and not too busy rolling his eyes, could possibly understand.

  And with that, the sweathog staggers out of the store, tumbles into a corner shop, grabs two handfuls of chocolate delights, piles more than enough pound coins onto the counter to pay for them, and flops out onto the pavement to sit down, forcing pedestrians to go around him as he slowly and determinedly dines on his Starbar, Crunchie, and Cadbury Fruit and Nut one by one by one.

  He looks down at his notebook, so recently in the possession of the underfed Radioheads. The artistic scribble produced by the Rod Stewart wig with the teeth is smack in the middle. In addition to providing his priceless signature, “Thom” has provided these words of sparkling wisdom:

  “Literature rots the brain.”

  Our hero disagrees with this assessment, for he feels he’s encountered many books that have enriched his life immeasurably. For the life of him, though, as he chomp-chomp-chomps on his late lunch/early dinner, he can’t come up with the name of a single one.

  He closes his eyes, smiles, and triumphantly whispers to himself the title of the first unarguably life-enriching book to pop into his head.

  “Green Eggs and Ham!”

  CHAPTER 11

  “Hey, yeah, I think maybe you should go.”

  “I’m sorry, what?” I asked the adorable guy who stood naked in front of me, his firm, partially toweled torso blocking the two turntables against the wall where he’d so recently given me an impromptu, weed-inspired DJ lesson. We were taking a break and cleaning ourselves up after a hot and heavy nude wrestling match that we’d finally, finally fallen into after a nice dinner, a few drinks, a drive to his apartment, a few hits on his pipe, a debate over the quality of mid-period Wire compared to early Wire, a heart-to-heart about a recent bad breakup he went through, and the aforementioned DJ session. He’d just walked back into the room after a visit to the bathroom, and I’d assumed we would maybe have a few bong hits, a couple of shots, and then a serious nap before waking up for round two.

  “Yeah,” he continued, “I’m really sorry, I just—I’m a little messed up from this breakup, and I think I jumped back in too soon.”

  Wait a minute, I thought. You spent a great evening and part of the night with a semi-handsome devil (that’s me), an hour or so of which you spent naked and moaning, and now that the horsy ride is over you are regretting letting such a decent-looking specimen (again, me) get so close to you, because emotions? Or is it because you’ve nutted and now you’re done, so get out? Ugh, change the record, this song is terrible.

  “Oh,” I said, nodding and suddenly feeling figuratively as well as actually naked. “OK. Uh…”

  “It’s me, I’m really sorry. I just think I need to be alone.” His cute face displayed the same soft, bright-eyed, welcoming expression it had shown all night—to gaze into those eyes you would have thought he was asking me how I like my eggs rather than telling me to get the hell out.

  I got up and started putting my clothes back on, my entire lily-white body flushing with embarrassment. I silently got my stuff together, and we got into his cherry-red Mustang for the excruciating ride home to Raleigh from his apartment in Cary.

  I looked out at the endless string of strip malls and cookie-cutter houses we passed on our way and thought, “Well, at least I won’t have to come to Cary all the time.”

  Bow Wow Wow was playing on the ’80s radio show, which was fitting because I felt like a hound dog. Our
trip back to my apartment had so far been completely wordless, but I couldn’t stop myself from trying to find out what happened.

  “Was it something I did?” I asked as we pulled onto Cary Parkway. “Was I too forward? Too loud? I was too loud, wasn’t I?”

  “Oh, no. Please, it’s not anything like that.”

  “It was the sweating…”

  “No, no. I just…”

  You just…

  “I just…you know, I just moved here from LA, I’m getting my bearings, I just…put myself out there too soon.”

  The operative words being “put” and “out.” I nodded, and decided to just try to accept that this little chapter in the Harlequin romance novel of my life was, for whatever reason, a regrettably short one. Too bad, because this was the sexiest car I’d ever been inside.

  We pulled up to Mordecai Manor, my apartment building, and my tote bag and I got out of the car.

  “Well,” I began, leaning down to say my good-byes, “thanks for the…you know, for the…”

  “Yeah, no, you know, I’m sorry, I just…”

  You just…

  “I’m an idiot, and I dragged you into my stupid world when I shouldn’t have.” He looked into my eyes as he said this, and he seemed to mean it. The idiot part. “I’ll see you around,” he said, shifting his Mustang into gear.

  “Sure.”

  And then he was off, and I was there with only my stupid tote bag for company. I stood there once again channeling Molly Ringwald and her eighties pout and eye roll. This only made me feel worse, though, because it was now the mid-nineties, Simple Minds were long gone, and I was getting too old for this shit.

  It had been a fruitless few years in the love department. I’d left England and returned to Chapel Hill to finish school, during which time I had a brief affair with a hunky older man I met in the public library, chased after a poet narcissist for months and months with nothing to show for it at the end except a nervous breakdown, and had a series of drunken, no-strings booty shakings that never led to anything beyond the requisite limp of shame the next morning. Then I went to London to sow more wild British oats before returning home once again to Raleigh and moving in with Dani at Mordecai Manor.

  No longer a teat-sucking college student, I’d also lost my health insurance and couldn’t for the life of me get a decent health insurance policy. This was because the leaders of our great nation couldn’t see the difference between (1) developing a health care system where all citizens have access to what they need to stay alive and (2) communism. There’s no difference! Freedom ain’t free! HillaryCare! But thanks to the good folks at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, I was able to get catastrophic coverage for the low low price of $695 a month with no coverage for anything diabetes-related.

  So, in order to stay alive and experience my ennui to the fullest, I was spending all the money I was making at my job waiting tables (really should have chosen a better major than English) on the things I needed to keep my body functioning and upright on a day-to-day basis: daytime insulin, nighttime insulin, glucose test strips, lancets, syringes, and the occasional doctor visit. When money was especially tight, which was almost always, I scrimped on the test strips—the most expensive supplies to keep stocked—and so stopped regularly testing my levels.

  At any given moment, I had no idea what my blood sugar level was as I was wandering around used-record shopping, driving to Chapel Hill for a show, swimming laps at the aquatic center, or working at the restaurant. Was it two hundred? Could be. One twenty-two? Maybe. Eighty-nine? Don’t know. The only time I knew the general levels of sugar in my blood was either when it was way too high—in which case I would get dehydrated and my bladder would start whining—or when it was way too low—in which case, if I were at work, I might forget to take your order, bring you potato salad when you asked for a cosmo, never give you your bill, keep asking you over and over if you’d like anything else when the answer has clearly been “no” for the past half hour, or sit on a box of wine in the wait station laughing maniacally before falling facefirst onto the floor and having to be carried out by the EMS.

  Basically I was growing into an exceedingly sloppy post-collegiate adult diabetic who hadn’t even made it through his graduation ceremony without almost passing out. Even worse, I was an exceedingly sloppy post-collegiate adult diabetic without any dating prospects. Never a big fan of the bar scene in Raleigh—“bar scene” being a generous term meaning “two bars on Hargett Street downtown”—I’d recently ventured into the personal ads section of the Independent Weekly, with varying results.

  GWM, 24, tall, medium build, big music fan, into Woody Allen movies, very short walks on the beach, and the sound of synthesizers, seeks GM for whatever happens.

  I’m thinking I should have been more specific. I got a few responses, only a fraction of which came from people who seemed to have actually read and processed the ad. I called one guy back, and the conversation could best be described as utterly pointless.

  “Hi, Gary?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hi, this is Tim. You answered my ad in the Independent?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So…what are you up to?”

  “Just watching the game.”

  “The game?” Hmm, he watches games?

  “Yeah. Then gonna go for a run.”

  “So…did you want to set up a time to meet?”

  “Well, I gotta go for my run.”

  “Uh-huh. Do you want to maybe call me back then?”

  “Yeah. I’m not sure how long I’m gonna be.”

  [Long pause filled by commotion from the game.]

  “OK,” I said, unsure of how to proceed.

  “OK, see you.”

  Click.

  Couldn’t believe this nice man had to resort to the personals to meet people.

  Soon after I happened into a physical affair with a guy in his thirties who worked at the thrift store. He had the appearance of a man who’d lived a hard life—a sickle-shaped scar on his face, teeth like fallen dominos, a long and thick burn mark on his arm, and a tight, sinewy little body that he probably, when he was younger, used to sell for cash. He was also very forward. I first met him when I was shopping for some cheap threads—I was getting low on ugly corduroy pants to cut into shorts—and he checked me out, in every sense of that phrase.

  “Hey, so,” he said, putting my pants into a plastic bag, “give me your digits.”

  “My digits?”

  “Yeah, I’ll give you a call and…”—he looked at me straight in the eyes to convey his seriousness—“maybe come over later.”

  I gave him my digits immediately. I then went home, showered, cut my new corduroy pants into a dazzling new pair of shorts, and waited for his call. His call arrived, followed by his pickup truck. I put on some music, cracked a beer open, and in he walked in a wifebeater, a backward baseball hat, and Bermuda shorts. We sat down on the little couch in my bedroom, sparked up a doobie, then, almost before the weed had reached our brain cells, started devouring each other like bacon cheeseburgers.

  “All right, cool,” he said after we were done and he’d already started putting his minimal amount of clothes back on. “See you later, yeah?”

  Fun and very simple. We met up whenever the mood struck us, cracked open a few beers, and had a nice bacon cheeseburger for dinner. When we were not playing nude safari we had nothing to offer each other. I had no idea what he was up to five minutes before he arrived or five minutes after he left. Was he at work bagging up ancient fashions for his store’s broke clientele? Huffing paint at the bus station? Babysitting? Who knew? And he had the same amount of knowledge about me and my paint huffing.

  In spite of our unstated don’t ask/don’t tell policy about life details, I did finally find out one thing about him after a few weeks. I booty-called him one day, and who should answer his phone but his boyfriend, who I’d never been told about.

  “Hi, is Craig there?”

&n
bsp; “No, he’s not.”

  “Oh, OK, can I just leave a message with you?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Uh…, just his friend Tim.”

  “Tim? Tim? I don’t know any Tim! How does he know you?”

  “Oh yeah, OK,” I stammered, my eyes widening with panic. “Yeah, I don’t know, maybe just tellhimIcalled.” Slam.

  Shit, I thought. I’m a home wrecker. A jezebel. I am…the other woman. Like desperate Angelica Huston in Crimes and Misdemeanors or that awful woman in Muriel’s Wedding. I felt dirty and gross. You know what made me feel grosser a few hours later?

  Beep.

  “Hey, Tim, this is Craig. Listen, I’m not sure what you said to my boyfriend on the phone, but I don’t really appreciate it. So, yeah, that’s about it. You don’t have to return this call.”

  Click.

  I stood against the wall, speechless. After a few moments I had collected myself enough to continue the argument to a Craig who wasn’t there.

  “Well, Craig, you little asshole,” I said haughtily to the answering machine, “I wouldn’t have said anything to your boyfriend if I’d known he existed!” I will cuss out an answering machine.

  The phone rang again, and I jumped.

  “Hey, Tim, it’s Karen.” Phew.

  “And Kelly!”

  Karen and Kelly were my coworkers at the Black Dog Café, and thanks to the futuristic technology of the nineties, we were able to talk to each other on the phone all at the same time through the magic of three-way calling. More importantly, they weren’t Craig or his boyfriend calling to give me the once-over twice.

  “Hey, y’all, what’s up?”

  “Weeeeelll,” Karen started, “weeeee wanna set you up.”

  Oh God. Not that game again. As all gay folks know, the road to gay hell is paved with the good intentions of straight people. Never before in my short number of years living as a gay man had that phrase—“we wanna set you up”—been a preview to a really good movie.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “It’s my boyfriend’s friend,” Kelly asserted.