My Oma always had hard candies. Care packages from Germany came every four months with rarities such as Haribo gummy bears, Mozart Kugels, and the holiest of holies: Swiss Milka chocolate. My family had our favorite combinations- milk with hazelnuts, with raisins, dark with almonds, coffee marzipan… My American Grama Fritzi made bitter orange rind jellies covered in rock candy sugars, and small diamond hard cookies with shattered candy cane inclusions. My great aunt Else had different hard candies in her capacious cream colored leather purse: mentholated mints cool blue and green, wrapped in plastic foil.
Halloween meant huge hauls of sweets. Each house had different offerings: small chocolate bars, bazooka Joe gum, circus peanuts, peanut butter cups, candy corn, homemade coconut squares, mike&ikes, Charleston chews, apples… after marauding through the neighborhood with a stuffed pillowcase I’d sort my loot, dividing it into piles ranked by rarity and desirability. Trades would be made with my co conspirators based on their selections and palates. I thought I’d have candy for months- usually within a week or so it would all be gone; leaving the plastic paper and foil wrappers like molted cicada husks scattered under my bed.
In fifth grade I got busted for shop lifting candy. Sugar addiction had driven me into a life of crime and compulsive consumption, co-morbid with obsessive hoarding of sweets- and the earned opprobrium of the dentist. All this did not slow me down- the sweet tooth remained unsated.
Honey, molasses, Demerara, crystalized, powdered, tree sap, corn syrup, carob, cacao, berries, tamarinds, melons, bananas, apples, peaches, nectarines… matrices of simple sugars. Wafer layered pastries, poof fluffy cakes, carmelized rhubarb bubbly pies, fresh hot doughnuts, krimkraker, Lefse with butter and pure sugar… high grade sugar delivery systems.
In college I worked the night shift at a doughnut bakery walk up window. At bar time a flood of drunken youngsters would crowd around waiting for dozens of doughnuts fresh from the vats of fat and glazed ambrosia. At the blue light end of the shift I’d take bags of the day olds and bike up State street distributing the doughnuts to the unhoused, and the street musicians playing for the staggering bar flotsam. I tried every doughnut on the 36 type menu at that bakery. My favorite were the blueberry cake freshly glazed-almost too hot as they air crisped on the conveyor belt.
The relentless pursuit of sugar eventually led to alcohol- the perfect saturated sugar solution. I was ready and well trained to seek that buzzy halcyon high outside myself: wrapped in a dazzling mirage of shimmering and susserating promises whispered through candied lips. Icarus’s burned offering ash: my body - glucose crashed through years fragile, kidneys wounded, and liver scarred. The highest highs map the lowest jones; and inscribed it into the convolutions of the brain. The hungry ghosts implacably demand the complex Neuro chemical cascades. A powerless pickle praying to return to unchewed cucumber.
What will remain? A toothed skull grinning gold cavities: each absence tracing the careful contours and shinning strength of unquenchable desire.