Esteemed Tunnel Reader Readers,
Dalkey Archive offers our apologies on being approximately 48 hours late delivering the July edition of this particular newsletter. As you will see below, there were some minor difficulties with typography, as the average newsletter software was perhaps unprepared for the complexities of a work like The Tunnel.
It has been a fitting problem to take on, we suppose, in light of Gass' own typesetting difficulties, and the comprehensive design document that he provided to his publishers in 1995 for the purposes of illustrating his vision. That design document was featured in the innaugural dispatch from this newsletter, and interested newcomers are encouraged to enjoy it as a cross-section of the novel.
Which brings us, then, to the novel. What follows is a section taken directly from the pages of The Tunnel, and for some readers, it may be their first taste of the text.
Gass constructed his monstrous masterpiece across the middle-third of his life, and as such, more than a dozen excerpts from it appeared in various of magazines, literary journals, and several cassette tapes from the American Audio Prose Library.
"Sweets," as this particular chapter of the book is called, appeared in the Fall, 1991 edition of Dalkey's own Review of Contemporary Fiction, roughly four years before the publication of The Tunnel. Interestingly, this same excerpt would appear the following winter in the February, 1992 issue of Harper's, text unchanged, but under the title of "Sweet Things." When the book was completed and unveiled to the world, the name had been reverted back to "Sweets."
Gass was a remarkably confident writer, as indicated by the fact that, beyond the title, only a single sentence of the text itself would be changed over the course of it's appearance in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Harper's, and finally the pages of the novel. We believe that these minor alterations highlight the care given to every word, and explain the geologic scale on which we must measure Gass' writing. If it took several months to add a word to the title, and an uncertain amount of time (maximum: three years) to remove that same word, readers should easily be able to see how it required ~35 years to write a book of The Tunnel's scope and gravity.
If this is your first brush with the hypnotic and repugnant mind of The Tunnel's narrator, William Frederick Kohler, we wish you the best of luck. The passage you are about to read appears in the novel's penultimate section. It is a relatively-straightforward flashback, detailing how Kohler came to hate the art of poetry. It is also the a dire warning that no matter how careful Kohler has been, he will always, eventually, find himself red-handed.
Gass was, in the words of fellow writer John Gardner, a "sneaky moralist."
Make sure you brush those teeth.
Until next time,
Dalkey Archive Press
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SWEETS
I might have been seven or eight. Childhood doesn't include clocks. Well . . . I might have been eight or nine. Nine. Nine is more likely. At least it doesn’t include clocks that clock. Once upon a time I had a wooden clock and could fix its hands to any hour I hoped it was. So maybe—conceivably—I was ten. I must have looked a baby with my softly furred face, round as a drawing and pink as a postcard mailed from Miami. I should have had my foot on the— which rung? let’s see: preschool, kindergarten, first grade, second, third—no— fourth step of the ladder of life. The school I attended was in such a well-scrubbed residential neighborhood there was no storefront space where a luncheonette might lodge or a candy store suspend its Coca-Cola sign, although sweeteries could be commonly found near schools all over town. Every morning I would walk my baby body the six boring blocks to class, and then drag it back again in the late afternoon, lugging my books in a cardboard case the color of pup-tent canvas, the shape of a stack of neatly folded shirts. Except for a threatening dog now and then, or a bully boy whom fear had fattened (my father had told me it was fear they were full of), nothing but weather ever happened along the way. I remember I liked to skip. Skipping is like sailing, I suspect. Sailing is like singing. But I was six or so, surely, when I went to school skipping. If I felt bothered by the bully, who liked to plant his bulk in my path and try to transfer to me some of the fear he was fat from, I would dart around him, shouting “Fraidy fat, fraidy fat, fat fat fraidy” over my shoulder as I ran, and regularly outracing the wretch because, though a butterball myself, I could run as though rolling. If my flight was his triumph, his failure to nab me was mine. Occasionally he caught me, of course. Then he would punch me hard on the muscle of my arm and push me away with a laugh of scorn. Clearly his bullying didn’t amount to much. Every bully has a bully in his background, my father said. I wondered who his was. My bully had a habit of being tardy, so I soon learned that if I employed a brisk step our paths would never intersect. His shirt, I recall, was always loose as a blouse, but I can’t retrieve his name. Stained irremovably, with food spills the shape of lakes. Later he played football on the high school’s second team.
Time is a great wit, though we rarely laugh at it. My clock had a cuckoo painted on its brow, and black wooden arrows where they said its hands should be. With my tongue pressed against the roof of my mouth, I would make a loud thock when I moved the pointers, each thock so thick it could serve as the tick for an entire hour. Thock. Somebody told me skipping was for girls. Was it then I stopped? It seems like a dream: there was never such a school as mine, submerged in the past as the word ‘school’ suggests; there was never a Fat Freddie to torment at recess, when we would circle him, singing; and I was never that self who sang, who ran, who bellyached. My school is now a confused passel of flitting thoughts. It seems a dream because each piece of that past is brighter than anything is bright in present life, more real than real, like a toy. I had a painted puzzle, made of wood, which I tried to force into my considered shape for the United States. I forced. I failed. Nothing fit. I bellowed. And flung the pieces at the four corners of my condition. Which one was the one which was lost? When I couldn’t find it, I bawled. Of that moment of woe, I only remember an open mouth and a runny nose.
Freddie. Yeah.
Freddie at one—
what?—
weighs a ton.
Freddie at two—
who?—
is a greasy Jew.
Freddie at three—
he
can’t climb a tree.
Freddie at four—
still
eats off the floor.
Freddie at five—
Harding, Garfield, McKinley. The city’s schools were named for presidents. Taft, Pierce, Polk. I don’t think many of us knew who of these noble leaders had been assassinated; who had been illegally elected or made titillating through scandal; who had croaked while doing the bumpydump—our euphemism for the deed of darkness then. We believed that every famous man was famous for good, true, and sufficient reasons, but also that each one had died in the saddle or while committing some other sexual misdemeanor. It was the lore of schoolboy life or the lie of the land. Well, no . . . the lie of the land was the placement of Idaho, the identically featureless shapes of Colorado and Wyoming, the deceptive division of Michigan. Nevertheless, the state I misplaced when I flung the puzzle pieces from me in my peevish fit may have been Arkansas. Some such. I recollect there was, afterward, always a hole in the southern tier like a great lake. Like one of the stains on Freddie’s shirt.
A more enduring complaint was the lack of a candy store at my own school—Taft. Taft was as portly as Harding, who also wore a watch chain and bore a big head above a black suit, both prexies sporting a sober and ambiguous sort of smile in their portraits, though it was Taft’s picture, presumably, which hung in the principal’s office next to the state flag and a hoop which held a bronze basketball within its rim like a huge scoop of chocolate creaming in its cone. “For the lickings we gave to other teams,” the Prince would say to par-ents who came to complain about the spankings their children had received. I could swallow an entire day by thocking my ticks through a quick twenty- four—thickety thockthock. The day to come or the one passing through could be equally, easily, eaten. The Prince had a shark’s smile, as if his jaw were always open and his teeth were under water. “Sonny is complaining of a sore bottom, is he? His pants aren’t thin from sitting in class like a scholar, I can tell you. It’s like beating the dust from a carpet—tanning your kid.”
The Whacker didn't have a hole like they said: a hole like Arkansas made in my puzzle as soon as the state went missing. It wasn’t light as a Ping-Pong paddle, either, though that was also alleged. Instead, it was long, thick, smooth, and shellacked like a table. Now, with more experience of the world, I would compare it to a cricket bat. As a consequence of my school's lack of social services, I hadn’t a single soft cylinder of toffee to melt among my teeth, its remains during geography class clinging to my porcelains like a trace of turd in the toilet—no—so I suffered nary a dental cary (as the jingle went then), because the system had betrayed me, denied, gainsaid, deprived my teeth and tongue of their pleasure; and, while I walked or skipped to school, I searched for the place where the store should have been, even if my eyes were out of breath and fearful from a bout of bullyrag; singing the scales we were meant to memorize—fa sol la, fa sol la ti do; and I imagine my beloved’s alluring trade name spelled out in the physical shape of the shop as if the shop were all sign like the house of the old woman who lived in a shoe. It was a referent unspecified and missing, maybe, but I felt it was simply in limbo, like Arkansas somewhere under the sofa, the state’s shiny surface softened by dust, and out of even an insect’s interest.
Dust always means death. In the dictionary it does. Sure. To beat one’s way to dusty death, didn’t we memorize? along with do re mi, gamuting at a gallop, singing, sailing, skipping along the sidewalk of life. O what a dusty answer gets the soul when it trills the rills, metering mightily, didn’t we memorize? Ut queant laxis resonare fibris Mira gestorum famuli tuorum, what? sol. . . Solve polluti labii reatum, learning goes on as long as it’s in song, Sancte lohannes, hey, how about that for a mouthful of what the paddle taught the ass? it turns the jaw to chop chop, the skull to skull dust, drives the tongue to do the cloddy thockthock, all together longgonging the daytune, always ending with the low do on the pay scale, oh gee, music, what fun it was to be a kid and kazoo the culture.
There were candy stores at all the other schools. It was unfair. It was an injustice that my Taft had no Toffee House or Cookie Cupboard, especially when the cheeks of Taft’s portrait looked stuffed; when his watch chain rested on his belly like a snake in the sun. There were no holes bored in the palm of the Prince’s paddle, as I’d heard, to facilitate its easy movement through the air. No. It was solid through and through, wood from heart to handle. Rhode Island occasionally hid under Nevada or Texas, but it was nevertheless reliably somewhere, recoverable. The McKinley School had McKinley Korners, though the store wasn’t on one. Harding High had the Harding Sweetshop, whose lavatory walls were papered with Petty Girl posters and where lines on the floor purported to be the graphic realization of an ejaculation contest. High boys pissed there, after all, and had hair on their privates. I quit skipping because I couldn’t come, and someone had said I should be able if I weren’t really a closet Mabel, with only a girl’s grin beneath my boxer briefs. Come to what, I wondered. He ain’t up to it, my frigger said. Well, I was up to the candy counter well enough. Mabel (the older boys would sing), get off the table, 'cause I was only foolin’ you. I let some pimpled kid, in training to be a fairy, fool with it. You can’t, he said. Cum. Lot I knew. To me, sex was like the candy bar (what did we say?)—only a snicker. Just because I had a dollar bill in my hand. . . What I wouldn’t have done with a dollar. That’s no reason for you to go an' misunderstand. . . What was it, I couldn’t? Can’t what? I thought. Drive a car? swallow a worm? I can’t, like Superman, see through steel. Keep from crying while being paddled. I won’t, like Sammy Glick, shit in my hat. Which “can’t” was the can’t I couldn’t? the can’t my frigger and his friends—they meant?
There was Garfield. Yellow brick building as run-down as back stairs. It was said to be the school of choice for spades. Yet Garfy had the InM. Goober’s tubers. Paper shades shaped like peanut shells were wrapped around dim amber bulbs which hung from its ceiling. In the dark and after hours, those rows of dangling Maidenforms must have resembled a colony of snoozing bats. Suitable for the souls of spooks. R.I. was cute; I had no opinion of Indiana; but Idaho was ugly; it had the outline of an uprooted tree. The wind would whistle through the paddle holes, they said; but there were no holes, the wind didn’t whistle, the board was suddenly there—there against your backside: bumbam. The holes were meant to blister you, polka-dot your bottom, they said; but there were no holes, and you felt your flesh redden as if it were frying, redden in a long swatch of shame like a blush so severe it left a bruise. Freddie at ten. Yeah. We sang the Fat Freddie tune to the tenth rhyme. So I must have been . . . Freddie at ten—what? clucked? no, it wouldn’t have been. He went out like a match in the ring of wind I had arranged for him. We would wag our fingers in his sweaty face. How red his cheeks became, like tomato puree. Ten. Pecked? nah. And not hopped. What? Laid. Like a hen. Ten. I was ten. I had to be—have been—ten. No wonder I couldn’t come. I must have looked like a lady baby skipping along to school, swinging my suitcase like Little Red Riding Peep, fa sol la-ing all those years from five to ten, skimming the sidewalk like a thrown stone, staying ahead of Fat Freddie, no longer intersecting him, no longer having to endure the soreness of molested muscle.
The Coolidge School would get built a few years after the legislature found the funds—forced by a boomlet in babies, I suppose—and then silent Cal’s Candy Cane would open its alliterating doors not a penny’s pitch away; but not even a furtive vendor soiled the sidewalks near my Taft. I lived on sweet-safe streets. So what did we sing for Freddie at seven? Beats me. Did some company manufacture paddles the way they did guns, and advertise them in catalogues for Princes and their pals to pick from? We sell only solid ash or hickory, such as are used in baseball bats, with good balance like bats too, having a fine heft, smooth handle, polished so assiduously an aimed-at pant will find its image flattened in the wood grain, a paddle silent in swishing, full of natural whack, long as a licking and the length of both butts, holeless so that both smacker and smacked will receive full value, its design top grade in every detail, guaranteed not to crack. Nothing rhyming with ‘heaven,’ chiming with ‘driven.’ Freddie at ten then? Laid like a hen? nah. As far as my chant went, he got no older. Maybe he was also a Mabel—the flabby-shirted fatso—whom I instinctively hated because he bore my future form. All right. A Mabel . . . maybe. They were called Kitchens, but they weren’t kitchens. They weren’t corners. They weren’t huts or hideaways or Peanut Palaces, either. The Candy Cavern wasn’t a cave. They were cool and dark and odoriferous, though. The scent of citron and ginger and cinnamon colored the air, and the smell of chocolate was everywhere like a shared low whistle of surprise. The promise of pleasure is a pleasure as insidious and enervating as a pain: there were all those liquids waiting to be drunk, all those creamies eager to be licked, those buttons begging to be bitten, chewies to be chewed, mallows to be gently mushed, leisurely tongued, and slowly swallowed.
Certain sweets were apparently essential, and these could be found in every shop, in company with the slogans which repeated their odd, enticing names, the signs which recited their virtues, including the calm which came from chewing gum (it was ruminative, inducing a cowlike docility), the deep-down goodness you would come upon in sodas, ice creams, cupcakes, cookie jars (which I always felt referred to final sucks, last licks, long reaches, the crumbs that clung to the muffin paper like life to life), the bursts of energy in kinds of candy bars, just beneath the wrappers, that were waiting to be released (a rush of sugar which would make you giddy with git up and go). All the stores had glass- or marble-topped counters, display cases, cash registers, ice chests, cheerless moms, disgruntled pops, and sometimes, serving you, their embarrassed resentful kids. Spaces were dark, small, crowded, secure in feeling like a winter den. So it was natural that, in many ways, these places should seem interchangeable. They each sold suckers which were wide and round as faces, and some which even had eyes and mouths and noses on them. There were suckers narrow and flat like tongue depressors, or the Prince’s spanking bat; there were suckers with suddenly soft centers, suckers as hard as glass, and transparent, too, when smartly licked; there were suckers the size and shape of paddle balls, in all the true fruit flavors, as well as spheres inhabited by root beer, reds made hot through some indeterminate spice, intense and bracing spearmint, slow caramelly melts, thick double-chocs.
I remember pans of fudge in regimented squares, shatters of peanut brittle, flat slabs of maple sugar, each surface roughed with raisins, chopped nuts, currants, bits of glazed fruit, or coated with shreds of coconut like frozen blades of grass. The shops sold rubbers, some said, if you knew what to say, and asked the old man in the right sort of whisper. They certainly sold cigs on the sly, adhesive reinforcement circles for your notebook, plus wide-lined paper and ink in several waterlogged tints. They had erasers like hats you could cover the bald end of your pencil with. Barrettes. Clips. Tin pins with smartassy quips on them. Kite twine and kites for the few weeks of wind, wax lips and funny faces at Halloween, egg dyes at Easter, stickers, tags, ribbons, and wraps for the Christmas season. Blood pads for periods, some said, if you knew what to say, and asked the fat missus primly, politely—if you presented your need as one innocent, unforeseen, desperate, virginal.
Sugar seemed the center of all satisfaction, and I am inclined, now, to regard it as a symbolic substance . . . well, not as a substance, really, rather as the ultimate adverb of value. Grainy as sand, soluble as salt, sugar was nevertheless a softener, not a sharpener, of sensation, taming the acidulous fruits, cooling the spices, smoothing the sharp, rough edges of brickies and crackles, warming ices. There was the colored sugar which covered cookies, the fine white sugar which snowed small cakes and powdered shortbread balls, and the sugar which had been bubbled in a broth of milk, chocolate, jam, and ground almonds, sugar which had been burnt, sugar raw as a cold carrot and brown as mud, sugar as refined as one of the legendary' Lowells, pure and white as a supremacist.
Sugar slid things past the palate so agreeably a person might willingly swallow a roach or a smart remark from a spiteful spouse if its frosting were creamy and rich and thick enough.
Mom and Pop pulled the window shades down against the sun, but there would always be a streak or two of light upon the counters coming from cracks in the old dry blinds. Faint reflections would rise from the scratched glass like still more odors to be added to an already complex medley, drifting dustily among the jars and sifting across the candy cases, carrying fragmentary memories of its journey, gathering faint tinges and dispersing a wan warmth. It was a sad, introspective, yet satisfying light, as if the way it lay on things were gentle, wise, and right. The cellophanes and foils gleamed too, but that was on account of the electric, which possessed an altogether different and less subjective illumination. Slick wrappings, pale stiff frostings passed that light along twisted lengths of licorice, which it made seem molten, until the light lay as if submerged in slow pools of dark cake, and went out at last in black, lavalike lakes of bitter chocolate.
I always counted the multicolored jellybeans in their large jars, just in case there’d be a contest to guess the number. I strained to read the faintly printed messages on those heart-shaped candies, sentiments placed squarely in the center where, on trees, “Tom loves Mary” got carved, though many were a mystery to me, like “oh you kid” and “monkey’s uncle.’’ Exactly what “twenty-three skiddoo” meant, I could not imagine. And I loved looking at the conical kisses in their silver foil—kisses with narrow paper fuses—kisses we called "love droppings," and later (older, wiser) I called “Fujis,” after the mountain. Some kids claimed, as if they knew, that unwrapping them was like baring a nipple. I liked to flatten the foil and smooth out its wrinkles with my thumbnail. Then I’d pile the squares in stacks like sheets of silver in a mint.
They glittered so grandly, they looked made—like knives—of blades of light.
The Harding High Sweetmeet was a far larger establishment than the others. It sold phosphates and sodas, sported big cakes beneath glass covers, boasted stools, malt mixers, spigots seltzer bubbled from like beer. It had piles of packaged pretzels and potato chips, caramel com and Cracker Jack, molasses cookies and sesame wafers. But every shop, however modest, offered milkballs, butterscotch, niggerbabies, gumdrops, jawbreakers, horehound, hot hearts, jujubes, caramels cut in soft brown cubes, strings of red licorice more tangled than yarn, taffy stale as the salt water it was said to be made with, Life Savers resembling cylinders of small change, silver shot in incipient spills, wafer sandwiches filled with vanilla, fruit slices and candied dates, root beer barrels, almonds enameled like store-bought teeth, Tootsie Rolls, chunks of chocolate in random hunks like turned-up peat, cookies covered with a crust of white frosting, gingerbread, cupcakes, and fresh fruit pies the size of one’s palm, as well as prominently placed boxes of candy bars wrapped in the marks of their trade: Butterfingers, Baby Ruth, Snickers, Oh Henry!, Hershey, Bit o' Honey, Clark, Mars, Milky Way, Powerhouse, Chiclets, and, for a time, Forever Yours. There were peppermint sticks and mint patties, wintergreen gummies in the shape of Irish leaves, and creamy yellow butter mints in noisy see-through sacks. In the big oak icebox, behind its clouded glass door, you could still identify bottles of lemon-lime, Orange Crush, Squirt, and grape soda, and make out the ranks of Nehi, Royal Crown, and Iron Brew, as well as the huddled bodies of a ginger ale which claimed it came from Canada to loft its zingy bubbles up your nose. Packets of Kool-Aid were stacked in wire racks like flower seeds, each packet bearing a pitcher brightened by colored water and enlivened with drowning parallelograms of ice. In the floor case, with the ice creams, were the Popsicles, drumsticks, and Eskimo pies, along with some candy bars frozen to a state only a gnaw could know.
I think I loved the richly decorated canisters almost more than their contents, and I subscribed with the fervor of a youthful heart to the idea of life which each of these stores seemed to represent: an ideal you began to serve as soon as you entered their doors, since you were immediately assailed by all the perfumes of pleasure; you were confronted by cases where trays and tins and jars of goodies were arrayed, by counters covered in packages be-dizened with a sheen of stars; and you knew that beneath each fancy wrapping tied with its satiny ribbon was a richly hued and well-wrought box containing, in its turn, a treasure seductively clothed and reclining on a bed of crumpled tissue; further, that within the splendidly gleaming thing itself were sweets of all sorts wound in scintillating papers, while underneath that ceaseless shimmer could be found peanuts, raisins, dollops of jelly, chunks of toffee, cores of caramel and flavored cremes, each coated in chocolate the way silk slips obey yet conceal their appealing bodies; so that first of all you had to approach the object of your worship, sometimes walking blocks on a dull cold day, and then you had to complete the commercial ritual: inspecting, choosing, expressing your wishes by pointing, by putting a name to your desire, and paying its price too, before taking it—as if in no hurry— into your hands, then almost leisurely turning to leave before your fingers began to act upon the wrappings (since there was a rule against eating on the premises), sauntering a short way, still shy as if you carried a bottle in a brown paper bag, appearing surprised that the sweet has been released from its conventions, but bringing it diffidently to the mouth where its final resistance melts away, and you have a bit of marshmallow to enjoy for a moment, or an anonymous surge of sugar, a taste of some exotic spice, a pop of mint, as the candy makes a second genital of the tongue, and before you think about, and seek uneasily for, another piece: insecure because you are aware you may become bored or sated; insecure because you fear the supply may run out; insecure because you wonder, after all, if it is worth it— the many-blocks walk on such a cold dull day, the loss of loose change, a perhaps too hopefully expectant state of mind—just for this bit of butterscotch, this nub of hazelnut, this soft blob of perhaps unmerited reward, this precious though transient gift of pleasure—ruinous to the teeth, the figure, the complexion—but prized because, in a life so founded on the continued useful operation of the senses, there was this pure, inherently idle, injudicious and indulgent sensation.
The Sweetmeet Shop at Harding High, so splendidly equipped, sold cones they scooped and packed by hand, frozen cakes which were layered with flavors and covered with ground-up nuts, those Popsicles in banana, root beer, grape, and lime flavors which you had to separate like a surgeon into separate licking sticks, warm homemade caramel corn, jawbreakers as yellow as mustard, and metal kazoos in automotive colors. They had yo-yos which hummed a tune, paddle bats with spongy red balls tethered to them, magic slates and magic squares, trinket rings and rice beads, police whistles made of stiff sil-vered cardboard whose shrieks were the outcries of clowns in clownish grief, not the calls of even Keystone Kops to one another, alerting the world to a crime. There were kaleidoscopes wrapped in what I would later realize were papers of a Florentine design, silly ornamented mirrors which reflected for you an apelike, doglike, or owlish face, puzzles fashioned from shrewdly bent nails, kooky combs (looking like barbed wire or buckteeth), and then, to startle enemies and amuse friends, fart bulbs for whoopee cushions, long obese worms in mating pairs, and a few lead horseflies trying to look obnoxious and alive.
Sarah has an Easter bunny
tucked beneath her little tummy.
If you give her candy money,
you can pet that Easter bunny
she has tucked beneath her tummy.
Of course, every such Sarah was as hairless at that age as a toadstool. I learned, early on, that poets lie.
Sarah says she soon feels funny,
when you pet her Easter bunny,
and if you get the bunny runny,
she’ll give back the candy money,
she has tucked beneath her tummy.
Which wasn’t true either.
If Sarah says that she feels funny,
because you’ve got her bunny runny,
she’ll start to call you “little honey,”
which isn’t worth the candy money,
she has tucked beneath her tummy.
So on Saturday, with the quarter which was my allowance for the week clutched in my left fist, I would set out for a sweetshop near another school, preferably the one by Harding High, although it was farther away than most— a hefty hike, really. I needed to keep back a dime for the Saturday matinee, and a nickel for goodies to eat through the show. I would reserve five cents for dire emergencies or overwhelming urges, which left me with enough to buy five pieces of penny candy. I always knotted my change in a hankie which I then stuffed deeply into a pants pocket, and I held the sack’s twisted neck in the same fist I initially squeezed my quarter with, skipping sometimes in eager anticipation of my feast, pirouetting on the pavement, dodging the bullets of imaginary bandits, fending off a pretend Fat Freddie, since I was suddenly full grown, momentarily bearded, immortal, in the movies.
I preferred to buy candies which were wrapped, not just because I loved the wrapping, which I saved when I could, but also because I liked to study each piece, arranging them in rows, in more complex configurations, concealing them in innocuous little boxes, and hiding these about my room with the uncanny skill of a secret agent. From such unseen places they emitted an energy only I could intercept, and I fed on them in this fictional fashion before I finally swallowed them, which I did eventually, consuming only one at a time, however, and at decent intervals, never as a feast, an orgy of incontinence, a vulgar glut. In fact, although each time, before my purchase, I imagined them all in my mouth at once, pornographically commingled and surmounted, one by another, I had to force myself to eat them before the end of the week arrived, when I would acquire, as was my comforting and oppressive habit, a fresh batch. Some sweets grew stale when they were overlooked; when they were mislaid, they furred the way the state of Arkansas drew lint; or they softened to a gooey gob or wrinkled like a prune if their hiding place itself was hidden, the candy, then, more undercover than a spy, lost to ordinary life but not to worms or mold or melt or rot; each—the little box, its secret spot, the thrice- concealed treasure—become a corpse, a coffin, an accommodating grave.
The point about the puzzle bits was, I suppose, that when chance was in charge, the chances were that at least one piece of those thrown would skid and carom strangely, reaching a place which no one hunting could guess at or remotely imagine; and the point was that things frequently took that course in daily life: there were shivers of broken glass which flew from the floor and point of breakage through the crack of an open cupboard door to settle in a tin in which muffins would be subsequently baked; you would sit on the only bee the arbor harbored, snap the frame of your glasses settling them more firmly on your nose; so the point was, I suppose, that a feeling for someone, a thought, perhaps about a little legal matter, a mot you considered for a moment bonny, might similarly be shoved aside by circumstances like the arrival of a guest, an abrupt stop in heavy traffic, and lie there lost, wherever it ended up, unrecoverable by any strategy—a gesture of gentleness, perhaps, a theory of evanescence, or an idea about the causes of drought—there to fade, fuzz, grow wan, or wrinkle into numerous ancillaries and instances and so many ifs as to be unrecognizably a gesture of any kind, a thought at all, were it to be encountered again by equal accident.
The best kind of candies were those which coated the tongue so it looked red or brown or green in the mirror, and whose flavor lay in the mouth like an Oriental rug—mint, say, and chocolate, intertwined. The Sweetmeet Shop was all the paradise I needed, but I couldn’t sing and celebrate it as some Big Rock Candy Mountain (I never understood that out-of-doors conceit). For me it was a mouth of the soft inviting sort one would later so hungrily kiss that tongues tangled and teeth got mixed; it was even the mouth of a whale, say, where Jonah and the fishes lived for a while—mouths in a mouth—before being swallowed or sieving out; it was the mouth of a cave which was redolent with spices and oils and other pungents, a cavern of smooth pastes and granulations, syrupy walls, sweet steamy vapors, the drip of a sugary rich saliva from the roof as regular as a water clock counting off the eaten hours, not with a thock but with a light tip tip tip that took some attention to discern and which was more often than not missed in the immediate storm of cinnamon or maple, flavors which released the juices in the corners of the jaws and closed the teeth into a deep creme as though they were biting on a bone.
I said I saved wrappers. I will still, in an absent mind, pull tight and stretch out the foil which has protected an after-dinner mint or concealed the chocolate which the hotel maid has left like a commercial kiss on the hostelry pillow, as if to encourage my teeth to decay during the indifference of my dreams.Cellophane makes a happy sound while being unwrapped, like a little hearth fire crackling. Its true visual is the crinkle of a smile. But lead and tin foils whose every fold fractured the light were my favorites. I caressed the paper, soothing its soul, as it were, pressing on those outer edges which had often been twisted toward a knot or folded as firmly flat as Doublemint wrappers were, returning the sheet to its pristine condition like a linen to its closet, as if it had never been upon a bed and knew neither sleep nor argument nor love.
Candy bars were often double-dressed, and placed upon a slick dark cardboard sled, as the mounds of chocolate-covered coconut were in Almond Joy: first the bright dress, then the dark slip, finally the slab. These layers were like the round world unpeeled as a map, or the shed skin of a snake displayed on some suitably weathered board. Over a delicate and glittery chemise, the Hershey bar slipped its name on a deep brown sleeve, and in order to preserve the sleeve’s full unfolded nature, it was necessary to pull apart the glued seam of the tube, a delicate business, instead of simply stamping it flat like those cigarette packs one sometimes saw run over in the road: more car kill. I suggested to my frigger, who was of course far older than I, that it might be amusing to see how his prick looked sheathed in a Hershey’s chocolate jacket, but he called me crazy and wouldn’t take his out after that—not even to wink. What’s the point of being a cock lover if you can’t dress it like a dolly now and then; if you can’t be a bit inventive; if you can’t have a little fun? So what if I couldn’t come? I could at least imagine.
Sarah says her bunny's yummy,
when sweetened by her little honey,
a licking that, for love or money,
makes her cheeks as warm and sunny
as the tuck beneath her tummy.
If you serve as Sarah's dummy,
to pet and play with Sarah's bunny,
and let her keep the candy money,
while she calls you “little honey,"
just remember fun ain't funny,
neither is the love of money,
Sarah’s got beneath her tummy,
nor the yearn to be a mommy
and bear another Easter bunny
she can call her “little honey.”
There were wrappers which looked good enough to eat; wrappers I ripped and shucked, peeled back for a nibble; wrappers I wadded and balled into a gutter going home, as I often was when I was eating; and despite my habit of smoothing them out—of hanging them like clothes carefully over a chair—I knew I'd sometimes be in the mood for a treat, and had saved at least one sweet in case . . . in case; because, homebound from school, I had to devour the candy quickly—it was a presnack snack—and wipe away all trace of sugar and spice before accepting the dying day’s rejuvenating glass of milk and, on a plate, a slice of my mother's toast topped by a layer of always nourishing peanut butter, the swirl of its application left in the spread like the flourish of a palette knife.
I would emerge from the store into ordinary air like some Sinbad from a journey, my poke in my pocket, my sack in my hand, secure in the ordinary world because I had so far survived the magical. Later I would read of brothels which were got up like that, like seraglios, like candy kitchens: lips of wax, breasts of meringue, nipples in the shape of chocolate drops, cunts like puzzles made of interlocking nails. You could look down on a shining expanse of thigh and see yourself in the shape of a phallic shadow seeking the space where Arkansas once went. West Virginia was without form, as if a spill had been caught in midsplash. That’s the way I once remembered it: Blobbyland. Cap. Puddlesville. Pop. Goats. Soc. Org. Feud. Prod. Stills. Crop Coal. Unlike most kids, I always wanted to postpone, then prolong, my pleasure, because I somehow sensed that it was a curtain which rose, when pleasure lifted, only to reveal, in good medieval fashion, the skull beneath the skin, the wooden clock which thocked only when I thocked, the horror show which happy times had concealed.
This was quite literally a shortsighted attitude. The truth of the imagery could be reached only when its course was completely run. If there was a skull beneath our powdered, shaven, coarsened skin, the brain nevertheless lay like a mollusk safely inside that protective shell, which, after all, gave shape to the face which would otherwise be a sack with no attraction; and if one kind of time was determined solely by my placement of painted arrows, I was merely mimicking the more trustworthy version which stood by my parents’ bed and roared its ring every morning; while it, for its part, with its tocky motions, ineptly tried to ape the smooth and periodic passage of the sun. There are Forms, and there are copies. Thus the pain which pleasure is accused of covering up— such pains of the spirit as melancholy, helplessness, ennui, which can fill life like an atmosphere, all the hurts of the unloved, the loneliness of rented rooms, the emptiness of the stored bowl, tarnish on an idle knife—are themselves a response to the fact that life without candy’s secondary pleasures, liquor’s wooze, the smoker’s nervous discharges, food’s fatful securities, is bleaker than the moon, even if one has carried out every plan and exercised every talent, done one’s duty and then some, performed faithfully the rites of spring and church and matrimony; because, for the plain straight telling of the time, the wooden clock is preferred (we would rather cozy up to a copy than close in on a Form); because Colorado ought to fit in Arkansas’ space after only a bit of trimming; because skipping deserves to be continued into briefcase days; but we know that something is wrong with the way the world has been made when, in addition to the doing of desirable deeds, there has to be the melting of some sweet reward in the mouth, the equivalent of a carnal caress, a little rubadubdub, spot of tonguing, a taste of Patties cake, before the work of existence will seem worthwhile; and it’s not that we might not persevere like an anchorite, toiling at otherwise unsatisfying tasks, living as meritoriously as a monk in a candy-clean community, denial the blazon on our shield, because we do—we do—we do it; but virtue for virtue’s sake, faith without reason, art for art, and other purities of purpose will not suffice for happiness unless ideals can be betrayed on a regular basis, virtue laid bare occasionally and raped with-out respite, if only on the sly; it will not suffice to be in love if you can’t hold that love with floured hands and roll it into a breakfast bun or a crust for pie now and then; it simply won’t be enough if you can’t chuck your work, and besmirch your honor, enclose your cock in a candy wrapper; if you can’t break a window with a brick or board, if you can’t beat up a bully, cry wolf while petting the lamb in its jaws, dance a gleeful dance to celebrate another’s dying; for up pops the question when dessert is served: where is the cherry? so we all require a spoon or two of sugar to sugar the sour truth that sugar is a necessity, that simple sufficiency is insufficient, that most prizes feel like penalties, that justice is but the beginning of what we want when what we want is to be unfair, since on a mountain made of more and more still more must be peaked; that after the dinner the diner appreciates his personal pot of coffee, with a snifter of brandy to follow, then the mint, perhaps a fondle through the trouser pocket, with luck a libidinous wink to the tune of a clink of glasses, the aromatic suck on a cigar, maybe a thigh slide hidden by the table, nibble of fingertip, napkin now covering the crumbs, and so to bed where skin shall kiss skin, ad in-, and dreams shall be deliciously depraved, infin-, till breakfast is brought in the bluest of mornings, infin-, infin-, ad infinitum.
I must have been eleven—twelve—when the punchboards began to show up in the shops. There were penny, nickel, dime, and quarter boards: mats as gridded as graphs and covered with a thin yellow-brown paper which looked both ancient and Chinese to me, like the wrappers around firecrackers— faintly waxy, faintly hued. With a peg which was attached to the board by a string, you pushed out a tiny tightly pleated tube of paper, then pulled flat the folds to read the news: “you lose.”
The news was always a number. Each punchboard had a lid which lifted straight back and stood there on a slant to prop up its “honeycomb" like a billboard by the highway. Here the rules of play were printed—kept simple for our simple minds—as well as a list of the winning numbers, along with the loot their possession entitled you to claim. The penny board promised nickel candy bars and pound boxes of the finest chocolates. A ten-dollar bill was the grand prize. Much older men began to show up in the shops to play the quarter board, and it was amusing to watch them trying to pull the little pills of paper flat with their thick bitten-back fingernails. Clearly, they had had no experience with wrappers. They shouldered their way in, played with hasty purpose, and left abruptly, looking grim, apparently oblivious to the seductiveness of heaped sweets, the light which sang of sugar, the heavy smell of spice, and the snickering of us kids, compelled into corners.
We were indeed living in grim times, my father said. And the men in the mills were on strike. Soon more and more of them could be seen standing around in small groups, angry and furtive. A quarter was an honest piece of change, the price of a haircut just as the jingle claimed, and Mabel could be persuaded for a buck to splay her body on a table and even giggle as we kids did when some guy took his chances with her. The strike was worse than war and looked to last longer, my father said. He wasn’t on the workers’ side, though, and did some extra hours inside the plant when he wasn’t at his regular job. “Scab!” the strikers catcalled while parading past our porch, scaring my one wit away, my father said, so I couldn’t study, and consequently went to school unprepared, sassing my teacher when she complained of me pretending to sleep at my seat, a seat soon after to endure—poorly—the Prince’s primal swats, swats which put a stop to my skipping, because I’d been called a scab, then a snippy pipsqueak, finally a crying baby, all on the same day.
I must have been ten to twelve. The workers were too lazy to work, my father said, but they could still kick you to death. Their quarters rang on the glass like requests for beer. Yet I never saw them leave with a wet mouth the way I supposed they would leave a saloon. Meanwhile I began my brief gambling career with mints. These cost a couple of cents and were thin and simple, crudely covered by circles of silver. How huge the men felt to us, bulking about in their big coats, crowding us into corners where we giggled to get revenge. They would smother a rolling coin with a fat hand. Mom or Pop or their sullen kid slid the quarters into a cigar box—nickels, dimes, my pennies too—keeping the punchboard profits separate from the candy take which went into the register drawer as it normally did. I was always surprised by the size of the piles I saw in the box.
If you bit into a mint which was pink, you won a prize, although I cannot remember what the prizes were. I don’t think it ever mattered much. Winning, itself self, was the trophy. I would bite white, time after time. At first I pinched only enough pennies from the family hoard to recover my allowance, but I soon grew tired of the sleazy little minties, and advanced my hopes to the nickel board, pushing out slip after slip of wrong numbers, and watching my sugar money get slickered away, each nickel falling with a faint chink down among the other victims. Eventually, still hoping to be in the pink when I bit into white meat once again, I would throw the remainder of the candy away in disgust; but after I gave up on the mints and began to punch, I saved my slips the way I once had saved wrappers, even though the slips, one and all, were losers. I stashed them in a Diamond Safety side-scratch matchbox where, released from their tube, and because they were accordions in character, they continued to express little local motions of expansion, and lay like larvae in what seemed a lively confusion.
At first I thought I was Mr. Big . . . betting. I thought I was Mr. Smart besides, because I got a piece of candy for my money as well as the gift of the main chance, grand prize. However, the candy was grainy, oversweet, a trifle stale; the mint flavor was harsh and weedy, the chocolate coating thick as thin paint, while the paper it came wrapped in was like cello without the phane.
Soon I was short of change. The sweet I wanted now had nothing about it that was cloying, nothing that was sticky, nothing chewable; it was one whose deep internal sugars had been superseded, and would bitterly dissolve in the heart’s mouth, since it could be found only in fruitless expectation: in the belief that pink would surely show up in the next pick, after my fingers had burrowed beneath the top lot in the box, while Mom or Pop frowned at the way I was feeling around for good fortune, for a sign, something which would say the world wished me well and that fate was on my side, smoothing my past as though it had wrapped a winner, smiling at me, showering me with wholly unearned and therefore truly genuine success.
I wished to hear from the country of my daydreams, a land which would alter all my addresses so I no longer lived where I had; where the air would launder my skin like clothes and I was hardly even me; where I hadn’t any parents, knew nothing of little provincial neighborhoods, was so bright as to be beyond school, capable finally of coming on command like a collie dog, skipping skips which drew gasps, and smiting fat boys with smites which caused them to fly apart like glass. In the pockets of that perfected place change jingled as loudly as an alarm for morning, and out of white butcher-paper bags I would toss jellybeans and toffee, the way kings had once flung ducats, to make sure I’d always be followed by an adoring, repeatedly greedy, multitude of fans—starlings for whom I would show a cardinal’s pious disdain.
In the bedroom of my parents, beyond the broad bed and against a far wall, was my mother’s cream-colored dressing table, its curvaceous edges enhanced by gold lines. There she combed her hair and put on makeup—whatever women did to fancy up their faces—and wedged into both rear corners of that relentlessly feminized piece of furniture, like nests jammed in a tree fork (because the top had a rim around three of its sides), were small triangularly shaped and cleverly lidded boxes: places to put wads of swabbing cotton or tubs of powder, hairpins or earrings—I’m not sure. The right-hand corner was the one where my parents' spare pennies went—the leftovers of minor pur-chases. It was a room I rarely visited, and it always seemed a little ghostly to me because its windows were so continuously curtained, and because the big bed, with its crocheted white coverlet, collected what little light was let in, like a catch basin in an arid clime, to form a colorless puddle surrounded by shadow and silence too, since the hush was also heavy, and I heard my breath as if standing in the cold and watching it cloud.
I slunk in once, raised the lid to stare at the munificent heap, and so disagreeably felt the tug of temptation that I sent a rush of blood to shame my face. Whereupon, I meticulously backed out in my tracks to confuse pursuers.
Squirrels approach a feeding hand in the same way—with creeps and retreats—until the peanut is possessed and confidence grows, greed overcoming fear, anticipation supplanting suspicion. The first time I crossed that implicitly prohibited private space, intending to filch a few pennies, the mirror above the dressing table drew my identity, improving the accuracy of its image as I approached, and posting my guilt, I felt, in front of every eye. I counted out two tarnished cents, then two more, finally two more coins, most carefully—sums sufficient for three mints, three dashed hopes, three miseries—vowing to return them the following week when I received my allowance, and promising myself I would sink this low but once, just once, in this one foolishly desperate, miserably self-conscious, scary moment of self-abasement.
Or if I won on my first try, then, of course, I would return the remainder immediately, perhaps with a bit of profit from my ten spot, which I’d break right away to buy a sack of swag, saving nine bucks—say—for an otherwise sugarless stretch of life which circumstances always threatened to inflict on me like the Almanac did the world with foul weather; and maybe I’d upgrade my wrapper collection, because finances had kept me lately in that plain slow lane called “penny candy,” and I’d begun stuffing used wads of gum back in their original jackets instead of sticking the chewage beneath the seat of my neighbor’s chair.
But it wasn’t long, and no surprise, before I was slipping in to steal a penny—first a few—finally a fistful from the pile, scooting out before my shadow could fall on the shag, trying to fill in the holes in my allowance, which more and more resembled the punchboard after I’d begun hitting the nickel wishes.
Who would miss a few pennies taken from a heap this huge? That’s what I believed in the beginning, but the dwindle was more rapid than I could bear to calculate, and I became reckless rather than cautious as the bottom of the box came into view and the shiny coppers I had avoided taking (as though I were stealing only the “bad” pennies nobody wanted anyway) began to gleam in the faint light like an advertisement for the absence of their dingy companions. I was even angry that my parents hadn't replenished the pot as rapidly as I was depleting it, for that had been an early dream: of a steady state for the pile, and consequently a constant supply for me of loose change.
My allowance, the contents of the penny box, a dime I found on the sidewalk, a few cents retrieved from bottle deposits, three small loans obtained from pals, the cut-rate sale of a cap gun (with nary a wink of good will in exchange, nor a winner, nor a moment of solace for my sweetneedy tooth): each disappeared behind the counter of the candy store, into Mom and Pop’s hoard, who had to know that such gambling devices were illegal, that selling chances to a minor was prohibited, and who had to have guessed what I was very likely up to in order to obtain my rather copious supply of funds; yet why should they suddenly choke upon scruple when they were in the business of corrupting children, and leading them on from penny jujubes to toffee bars, from sodas to shakes, and bags to boxes? They were said to traffic in condoms and dirty comic books, cigarettes and even schnapps. My parents said once they were Jews from Silesia. In any case, they belonged, in spirit, to that group of mer-chants who sold overpriced schlock in the slums. I observed the slyly indifferent, watchfully neutral way they peddled their wares, and I knew well they wouldn’t have offered the devil a spilled bag of caramel corn to save my soul, let alone slow by a second my profitable drop into their darkness.
I had to call a halt. I had to. My plan was: I would wait until the pot had magically brewed its potion once again, and thus avoid discovery. My plan was that in future I would frugally, though continuously, skim, achieving my dream in spite of an erratic economy. I would simply have to pause now and then to breathe between borrowings, and live on “interest.”
And I did stop, slipping into their bedroom only occasionally to have a look at the replenishment level, which, to my dismay, did not appear to rise at all. I suffered several days of sobriety before whisking in one afternoon after school to check the supply. My father’s first words frightened me as I have never been frightened since, and I let the lid fall with what might have seemed a thock if I hadn’t heard it like a pistol shot. Low, dry, slow, relentlessly it came like blows against my rigid back. I hadn’t the courage to turn to the bed where my father must have been lying (not in wait, I never supposed, but uncharacteristically resting). I must have slid right by him, my eyes fixed on my image in the mirror and on that fatal corner of the dressing table. Low, dry, slowly formed, the pronouncement came, my father’s voice full of pause and consideration, like maybe a judge’s, with a kind of penal finality even in midsentence, midphrase, and unlike the rather pell-mell stridency of his customary dress-me-downs and more commonplace curse-outs, those scornful accounts of my character which always included disclaimers of responsibility for my failures, for my laziness (not a whiff in his family), my shiftiness (in contrast to the stand-up nature of the relatives around me), my myth-making, my downright lying (whose cause could not be anywhere discerned), my obstinacy too, and my prolonged stretches of pout, sulk, and preoccupied silence which I seemed to take an inordinate joy in inflicting upon my undeserving family, who had always done their level best
. . . and all the rest. . .
fed me, washed me, made sure I was dressed,
repaired what I broke, cleaned what I messed
. . . and all the rest. . .
so I could live like someone blessed,
and bow my head at God’s request
. . . and all the rest. . .
but I had fouled my own sweet nest,
and cracked the hearts in their fair chests
. . . and all the rest. . .
so they would treat me, henceforth, as a guest
until such time as I went west
. . . and all the rest. . .
to seek my scuzzy fortune or confessed
my crimes, with remade mind, and soul distressed
. . . and all the rest. . .
whereupon, with sins redressed,
they might—of my presence—make the best: charges which were rapidly related, as if memorized, and hurled headlong at my head, between my eyes, as I always thought, causing my knees to bend a bit each time as if to duck, though ritually, a shower of stones. Perhaps his words were low and dry because his mouth was a well of dust like mine. Certainly they were rough as if purposely coarsened before they came out, and they felt like a file were being drawn across my inner ear.
So . . . so son . . . you have taken up stealing . . . at which you seem to be no better than you are at anything else . . . not just from your chums? your friend, Fred? what was it? the library's overdue box? . . . now you are stealing from me?. . . you are stealing from your father. . . you are stealing from your mother. . . no less . . . you must be a stranger . . . a thief from the street who’s come to take cash . . . maybe food? no? . . . maybe clothes? . . . to trash things . . . to break trust.
So . . . son . . . you’ve come here for money . . . come in here . . . for pennies . . . what is it you want you couldn’t ask your mother for? you couldn’t ask me? . . . your life lacks so much? . . . petty, these pennies . . . paltry little amounts, right? but the principle is the same . . . they make you just as much a thief. . . so . . . to sneak about. . . deceive . . . to steal from your mother’s vanity . . . no less . . . that, I wouldn’t have believed . . . on the basis of the past, your behavior at school, your lying, your sulks, all the rest. . . on that basis, I’d believe much . . . but from your mother’s room? to steal? . . . that way throw your life away.
Like Arkansas. That’s why it stayed in my mind. Because of what my father said. I would be—for good—for all the lint it brought me—the missing piece.
What had I wanted, he wondered, that these few pennies would buy? We would never know, he supposed, how much I had taken. Had I a hoard of my own somewhere nearby, or had I spent them, blown every penny, one at a time, like snot from my nose?
Without thinking, I confessed to the lesser crime. I had spent the money on candy, I said. You stole these pennies for what? for that? Gumballs and gum- drops, for sweets, I said. On sweets.
When my father ransacked my room, and discovered my collection of candy wrappers, he believed me. It was a silly enough reason. After all, I was only nine or ten. Sure. Why not? That way throw my life away. At ten.
For sweets.
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