Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (3 page)

The lone exception to the no-name rule was Jimmy Zucanti, who was maybe five years ahead of me in school and who once gave me a minor concussion during a game of tackle the pill and who, at a certain point, showed up behind the counter. This was a stupefying development: the equivalent of having an acquaintance anointed pope.

The Old Barrel sold all the basics, your major candy bars, your LifeSavers and gums, your ten-cent quick-and-dirties (Hot Tamales, Jawbreakers, Lemonheads, Red Hots, Mike and Ike). But at a certain point, I needed to broaden my horizons.

Patterson’s Drugs, on El Camino, stocked a candy known as Kits, tiny individually wrapped taffies that came four to a pack. Kits were smaller than Now and Laters and sweeter, and to my way of thinking, more distinguished. The packages were these perfect little rectangles, pink for strawberry, yellow for banana, brown for chocolate. I picked up 20 packs for a dollar and spent the balance of the afternoon playing with them on my bed.

This is generally what I did with candy: I played with it on my bed. I counted it. I organized it by color. I ran my fingers through it. I sat there like a pint-sized Midas and gloried in my wealth. Occasionally, I staged a kind of candy combat. I wasn’t mindless about candy. I was ritualized.

At about age ten, during a late summer visit to Sears to buy school clothes, I became aware of the concept of candy by the pound. This was revolutionary. Here were entire
stalls
of candy, naked as the day they were born, piled up two feet high and God knows how deep, glittering behind glass windows. You might have thought I was staring at tropical fish in an aquarium. Or you might have been the poor clerk forced to sit inside the Sears candy stand on one of the many ensuing Saturdays, which meant you faced an odd decision: whether or not to call security on the little, bubble-eyed goon circling your station, which was me.

What it was—beauty. The sheer, entropic plenitude of gumdrops, jelly beans, orange slices. I might buy any of these, merely for the joy of watching the clerk dig her shiny little silver scoop into the bin, pouring out my portion first in a great plinking rush, then one by one
(plunk, plunk)
as the green numbers on the electronic scale blinked up. Mostly it was saltwater taffy, which was relatively light and therefore cheap and came in nine color-coded flavors, all of which, somewhat pathetically, I recall in precise detail: the pink-and-red swirled cinnamons, green-ribboned spearmints, the chocolate drops with blurry dabs of cherry in the center.

At Sears, candy prices were governed by the law of supply and demand, especially after the seasonal candy rush. So, for example, the Christmas Mix reached a low point of 25 cents per pound if you waited until the second week of January.
(Dr. Gulevich: Are you sure he hasn’t been eating candy? The Mother Unit: I don’t see how. He only gets 50 cents allowance, and we don’t let the boys eat sweet cereal.)

At a certain point, of course, kids are supposed to outgrow candy. They move on to other freaks. My older brother, for instance, graduated from LEGOs to Estes rockets to beekeeping. Not me. By the early teenage years, I was making sojourns to the distant Mayfield Mall for a particular piece found only in the Kandy Karousel on level three. This was the mint parfait, two square slabs of bittersweet chocolate around a pale green center. Think a jumbo-size Andes mint, though with a sharper bite to the chocolate and none of that chalky aftertaste that plagues the Andes oeuvre. The parfait was a highbrow piece, and it amazes me a little to realize that I would ride my bike four miles each way and spend up to three dollars for a small white sack of them.

The discovery of marijuana more or less sealed my freak. I was never a burnout in the classic sense, meaning that I never grew my hair long and listened to Blue Öyster Cult and cut classes to hang out by the big oak tree next to the amphitheater. I was too terrified of academic failure to offer that sort of commitment. I tended to steal pot from my older brother and to smoke it alone, because smoking was something he did, something vaguely illicit, and though the quality of the weed was so poor that it would probably cause Snoop Dogg to go into anaphylactic shock, it did allow me to feel a gauzy sense of appreciation for the blessings in my life, chief amongst them candy. If I had been the kind of kid who kept a diary, the entries from the years twelve to say, sixteen, would have read:
Got high, ate candy
.

I remember, in this phase, eating a lot of Tangy Taffy. Where -fore Tangy Taffy? Because it was cheap. You could buy two slabs for 50 cents. They were tart enough to excite the salivary glands, a crucial factor in the battle against cottonmouth. Also, when buying a batch of candy—and by this time I was buying in batches—I liked to create a value gradient, such that I could eat the cheap stuff first and save the higher quality chocolate items for last. As for the actual taste of Tangy Taffy … imagine, if you will, a fruit-flavored caulk. Add some citric acid. Add some coloring. You’re getting close.

As should be evident, candy was my chief extracurricular activity. This is not to suggest that I didn’t do my share of candy worship in school. For a while there, before the Mother Unit got wise, I was given a buck fifty for lunch every day. The assumption was that I would buy, oh, I don’t know, cauliflower sprigs or something. What I bought was Granny Goose Nacho Cheese Chips, chocolate milk, and the fascinating new Twix bar, which I consumed by scraping the chocolate-andcaramel top layer off with my teeth, then sucking the remaining wafer-and-chocolate slab until it became a sugary mush.

Despite this diet, I eventually hit puberty and even underwent a do-at-home bar mitzvah (at age fourteen), which was not held in an actual hot tub, though I have from time to time told people this. For those of you not familiar with the mystical ways of the suburban Jew, the bar mitzvah is the ceremony whereby a boy delivers an achingly dull speech, mangles a few prayers in Hebrew, and thereby becomes a man. And just how did I commemorate this sacred passage into adulthood?

Got high, ate candy.

AN ILL-ADVISED DISCUSSION OF FREAK ECONOMICS

In the ideal world, moms and dads would have enough time and energy to fill their children with love, and brothers would take care of one another, and there would be lots of extended family members around to pick up the slack. But as it is, the developed world has become a cold, atomized place in which people are cut off from their internal lives and therefore subject to the most basic form of self-esteem extortion—materialism—which means that they have agreed to be judged by what they eat and wear and drive, by their fitness as capitalists, as opposed to, say, the content of their characters.

And this goes for children as well, who are, if anything, more apt to project their emotional life onto objects rather than people. Any parent whose child has a favorite blankie or sippy cup will back me up on this. What the folks in the boardrooms and on Madison Avenue sussed out a couple of decades back is this:
manipulation of family dynamics
=
big bucks
. Thus, the guilty dad will buy off his kid. And the deprived child will learn to seek love in material form.

Just as important, the folks whose job it is to move product (which is virtually all of us) have come to recognize that children are ideal consumers: impatient and dogged and ferociously brand loyal. Kids are also exquisitely attuned to the chaotic emotional rhythms of supply and demand. For what, in the end, was the mania surrounding baseball cards or Cabbage Patch Kids, if not a stock market in miniature? Or, better yet, Pokemon cards? If you ever spoke to a child in the thrall of Pokemon, you were basically talking to a day trader in vitro. Because these cards, in fact, had no utilitarian value. Their value was, as the wonks would put it, market determined. That market, while initiated by adults, was sustained entirely by kids.

Candy is the Dow Jones of the kid economy. And anyone who grew up during the sweaty seventies (as I did) can tell you about the various boom and bust cycles. I would cite the Bubble Yum craze of 1975 as paramount. Prior to this, your bubble gum genre had been ruled by either Bazooka (a solidtasting, if somewhat grainy nostalgia product sold as piece candy) or Rain-Blo (loudly colored gum balls that came in clear plastic wrappers). Bubble Yum marked an innovation of both form and content. The manufacturers intuited that one of the limiting factors for the bubble gum market was that the product seemed too immature. So they created a package that resembled a candy bar, with five individually wrapped cubes. The gum itself was smooth, almost creamy, and loaded with sugar.

The response was astonishing. For months, all anyone could talk about was Bubble Yum. The most popular girls in my junior high school carried packs in the back pockets of their jeans, which were so tight as to allow a view of the contours. (Thus to be seen packing.) Guys gave girls two-packs as the official seal of going-steadydom. The rich kids from Los Altos Hills would celebrate birthdays with entire boxes. Bubble Yum was de rigueur at dances, where close physical proximity to the opposite sex was an actual possibility. Oh, to be a teenage lover smuggling his boner onto the dance floor during “When the Lights Go Down in the City” without a piece to honey the breath!

The Old Barrel couldn’t even keep Bubble Yum stocked because the manufacturer couldn’t keep the Old Barrel stocked. One had to journey further out into the retail market. And this led, of course, to the black market effect. Guys like Bobby Hankey—who, it was rumored, had blown up a kitten—stockpiled Bubble Yum, then resold the stuff at considerable markup near the lockers.
(Bubble Yum dealers, dear, and right here in Palo Alto!)

The mania reached such a pitch that an urban myth arose: Someone had found spider eggs in his Bubble Yum. I’m certain this was nonsense, just as I am relatively certain that Rod Stewart’s stomach was not really pumped as a result of the ingestion of … oh, do I really have to go there? But the rumor struck me as meaningful nonetheless—an expression of communal guilt over our own rabid greed, and perhaps also a way of connecting to the larger world, to the other towns beset by the same contagion. Not even the emergence of various pretenders, such as Hubba Bubba and Bubblicious, could diminish our passion.

As dramatic as the Bubble Yum boom was, the Pop Rocks freak-out, a few years later, was ten times worse. Pop Rocks, for those who have never heard of them, are tiny fruit-flavored candies that come in the shape of finely ground gravel. They’re like any other hard candy—a boiled blend of sugar, corn syrup, flavor, and coloring—except for the secret ingredient: carbon dioxide gas compressed at 600 pounds per square inch. As the candy cools, the pressurized gas is released and shatters the candy. But there are still tiny bubbles of pressurized carbon dioxide inside each of the shards. (You can see them with a magnifying glass.) And when these shards melt in someone’s mouth, the gas bubbles pop. And I mean
pop
. Not just some soggy Rice Krispies–type pop, but a sound like fat crackling on a skillet—explosions, actual explosions, which registered seismically in the teeth, particularly if, like me, one decided to chomp down onto the Pop Rocks and not just let them dissolve on the tongue. Not only that, but Pop Rocks tasted good, sweet and fruity, and the different colors (cherry, grape, orange) actually had distinct flavors, not that it mattered especially because, my God, they exploded! A candy that explodes! No one had ever heard of such a thing. We were all instantly nuts.

Pop Rocks came in little packets, like vegetable seeds, and they cost up to a dollar a pack. Rather than discouraging us, this exorbitance merely enhanced their standing. They assumed a kind of mythic place in the pantheon of our economy—like saffron or high-grade uranium. Again, the result was furious black market activity. The Bobby Hankeys of the world bought up cases and sold them from the trunks of cars. My friend Evan, who lived in Connecticut, where Pop Rocks had not yet entered the market, had his aunt send him a box from California, which he resold at a nifty profit. An urban myth quickly grew up around the frenzy. To wit: that the snot-nosed child TV star Mason Reese had ingested lethal amounts of Pop Rocks and Coke, causing his stomach to explode. (In certain quarters, this rumor named Mikey of Life Cereal fame as the victim.)

By high school, the furor had shifted to gummy bears and later Jelly Bellys, both of which I consumed in embarrassing quantities, as a result, in part, of having taken a job at Edy’s Ice Cream, where both were sold in bulk. Gummy bears, in particular, suggested a certain sangfroid, because they were German. I tended to burn them with matches, thus combining my overt sugarlust with a more latent strain of pyromania. I loved the way the little gummy bear heads would sizzle and smoke, and the syrupy consistency of the resulting mess. I spent a considerable portion of my ninth-grade science class (best estimate: 40 percent) scorching the heads off gummy bears with the fabulous, empowering Bunsen burner.

My point here is that the candy economy has always been driven by the peculiar, streaky passions of children. Over the past five years, the market for extreme candies has skyrocketed. Back in my day, extreme was represented by a candy called Zotz, which were mildly flavored hard candies filled with a citrusy powder that fizzed on the tongue. The modern Warhead, by contrast, is so sour it’s impossible to keep in your mouth, unless you happen to be a nine-year-old boy determined to keep a Warhead in your mouth longer than your friend.

At last year’s Candy Expo, there was quite a buzz surrounding the Torcher Scorcher, which is a kind of Atomic Fireball gone apocalyptic. It is no longer rare to see candies with cayenne pepper and chilies. To me, this is taking things way too far in the direction of candy machismo/masochism. Then again, the Mother Unit said the same thing when I came home with a candy that exploded in my mouth.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING FREAK

The rhythms of freak are ruled by the holiday calendar, and specifically by Halloween, which as we all know, can be traced back to All Hallows’ Eve, an ancient religious rite in which priests raced around the streets of Dublin throwing snack-size Snickers bars at impoverished children.