Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (19 page)

Karl paused. She bent over to inspect the batch roller. Her brow furrowed. She had noticed a series of names soldered onto one of the rollers.

“Sammy,” she called out. “Sammy!”

Sammy was one of the company mechanics, a thin man in a blue cotton jumpsuit who was down at the other end of the line. He came loping over.

“Look at this,” Karl said. She gestured at the names. “Did you guys do this?”

Sammy looked at the names (sammy among them) and grinned bashfully.

I was worried that something terrible was going to happen now, that Karl was going to fire Sammy on the spot, all because she’d spotted this industrial graffiti, all because I’d come to visit the plant and asked to see the Abba-Zaba line.

But Karl surprised me. She burst out laughing. “Isn’t that funny?” she said. “You guys are so crazy.”

It struck me that Karl, despite her somewhat type A ferocity, was really a pretty nice woman, and I was relieved to find that she ran a factory where little individualistic flourishes like soldering your name onto a batch roller were to be laughed at, as opposed to what would happen to you at Mars headquarters, for instance, which is that you would be escorted from the plant and shot.

“Alright,” Karl said. “So we’ve got a sheet of taffy coming down the line. This is where the peanut butter comes in.” She gestured to the large warming tank beside the batch roller. “The peanut butter gets pumped over from this thing, which is a sort of peanut butter Jacuzzi, and squirted onto the center of the taffy. That part’s the most fun to watch. Then the taffy gets folded over, so it’s one continuous strip, and it gets fed through the cutter, which forms the seal on both ends.”

We headed back to Karl’s office, where some time was given over to the standard lamentations of small independent candy companies. Karl was particularly disgusted by the recent adoption of the phrase
real estate
to designate rack space. Because the Big Three had purchased virtually all the retail real estate, Annabelle was often forced to place the Big Hunk in a position where you couldn’t even read the name of the bar.

Karl had an aggressive sales staff, and she gave them a good deal of latitude. But there wasn’t a lot she could do when it came to the crucial variable, which was price. She feared that Annabelle would be one of the first casualties, should the Big Three begin a price war.

“The big demand from the sales network is always to come out with something new,” Karl added. “But that’s hard for a company like ours, because we can’t really afford to buy a bunch of new machinery. So we do brand extensions. My brother and I did the dark chocolate Rocky Road. And some years ago, we did a Choco-Zaba—”

“I remember those!” I said. “I loved those!”

I was one of the few, Karl noted dryly.

Still, she was always on the lookout for new products. Her most recent brainstorm was an Abba-Zaba with raspberry in the middle. Karl knew that fruit flavors had become really popular and that raspberry topped the list. She settled on the name Raza-Zaba and even began cranking out prototypes. The problem was that, after a few days, the raspberry would start bubbling through the taffy. So her new idea was to combine a green apple taffy with the peanut butter filling.

I had, in fact,
never
heard of people eating green apples and peanut butter. I asked her whether
banana
and peanut butter might be a more familiar combination? (My brother Dave had basically survived adolescence on bananas and peanut butter.)

“Bananas?” Karl said, experimentally.

“You could call it Banana-Zaba,” I suggested.

“Banana-Zaba.
Hmmmph
.”

I wasn’t sure what this meant, this
hmmmph
. Did it mean: Yes, by gum, that might just work! Or did it mean: Who are you again and why did I agree to talk to you? This was never made clear to me, because Karl clapped her hands and went to fetch me some samples and then, politely, sent me on my merry way.

12

A SECOND DEPRESSING BUT NECESSARY DIGRESSION

It was now Thursday, just before noon, and I had covered 4,000 miles in the past four days and seen the inner workings of four different candy factories and survived on a diet that would have made the International House of Pancakes seem like a health food concern. In the course of this journey, I had diagnosed myself with cancer and spent my idle moments in a froth of anxiety. The Republican Party had taken over Congress, so that coddling the rich was the new national pastime, along with watching wars on TV. I had not slept particularly well and, in a few hours, I would have to drive (without a license, ergo, illegally) to San Francisco International Airport to board a red-eye flight back to Boston, then take a taxi to my house, then drive out to Boston College, where a group of students would be waiting for me with their eyes full of cigarette lust and their hearts shut tight as antique lockets, and it would be my job, presumably, to do something about this.

I drifted over the Dumbarton Bridge in a haze of self-pity, gazing at the puny chemical tides rolling in and the tan hills of the East Bay, pleading for rain. Dead ahead was the megapolized mess of 101 and the sad old truth that home is never quite what you left. The trees and streets are all too small and your tired old parents are some newer, haunted incarnation, and you are no longer the child who stared at them in hope of rescue, but an adult responsible for your own sorrow. Just to make sure there was no confusion on this point, my folks had moved across town, to some big new imposter home. The Old Barrel was gone, too. They’d turned it into an old-age home.

It was Freud’s belief that people return, inexorably, to the trauma of their childhoods. And he was right. I had spent most of my adult life doing just that, making my best friends into cruel brothers, my bosses into negligent fathers, my sweet, clutching lovers into insufficient mothers. And thereby, fading into my late thirties, I still lived in a condition of aggrieved solitude, as I had so many years ago. I couldn’t escape.

I had always imagined that some splendid woman would come along and cure me. Or that my work as a writer, my passionate, empathic accomplishments, would overwrite the bad files of my childhood. And what I realized, as I drove through that light California rain, was that the burden of these great hopes was often too much for me to bear. I feared I would die before I got better. In certain ways, I wanted to die. And, in certain ways, I felt dead already.

I had decided to write about candy because I assumed it would be fun and frivolous and distracting. It would allow me to reconnect to the single, untarnished pleasure of my childhood. But, of course, there are no untarnished pleasures. That is only something the admen of our time would like us to believe. Most of our escape routes are also powerful reminders; and whatever our conscious motives might be, in our secret hearts we wish to be led back into our grief.

There sat the bag of goodies from Annabelle on the seat beside me. I reached in and grabbed myself a Big Hunk so that, even as these dark musings tossed me about, even as I gave myself over to tears, I was also tasting, for the first time in many years, the sweet, cake-batter nougat of that bar and the soft roasted peanuts exploding with flavor on my tongue; chewing and chewing until my jaw ached with the effort.

A LITTLE HIDDEN BOMB IN MY IDAHO SPUD

I don’t expect that it will come as any great surprise that the drizzle of that afternoon thickened into a torrential downpour. Nor that winds, sweeping down from the north, created the fiercest storm the Bay Area had seen in several years. Nor that this storm was serious enough to shut down the airport. I did not discover this last fact, however, until I had arrived at my gate.

This left me and 120 other fellow budget travelers playing a restless, grumpy waiting game, the central components of which were whining into cell phones and directing dirty looks at the poor schlubs working the ticket counter. In the course of commiserating with a few fellow passengers, I revealed the purpose of my trip, and before long we were munching our way through the last of the peanut clusters and chocolatecovered pretzels Marty Palmer had given me. A brief jolt of good humor ensued, followed by a plunge into hypoglycemic grumpiness. My connecting flight was at 7
A.M.
, out of Chicago. I had a 90-minute cushion, but the delay dragged on and on, one hour, two hours. Would they hold the plane in Chicago? Nobody could say. We were supposed to be in the air by 11
P.M.
, but it was 1:27
A.M.
before they began the boarding call.

And here is where the trouble truly began.

I want to make clear that I had grown accustomed, by this time, to the notion that my bags were going to be inspected by airport security. They had been inspected in Boston and Milwaukee and Kansas City and Denver and in Boise, twice. The reasons for this were quite clear. First, all my flights were oneway. Second, having lost my driver’s license, I was using an ancient passport, which featured a rather unfortunate photo taken in 1993. In this photo, my face was cloaked in eleven o’clock shadow and my hair was styled in a manner I can only describe as
Upscale Taliban
.

There was a somewhat comical aspect to these inspections, as my carry-on filled with more and more obscure candy bars. The woman in Boise had gone so far as to take these bars out of my suitcase and line them up, one by one, on her inspection table.

“What are these?” she asked me.

“Candy bars,” I said.

“Twin Binge,” she said. “I’ve never heard of a Twin Binge.”

“Bing,” I said. “It’s from Iowa.”

“What’s an Old Faithful?”

“Those are made here in Boise.”

She made a noise with her tongue, a soft click intended to express friendly skepticism. And this was just fine. This was Boise, after all. The flight was only half full. There was plenty of time for such shenanigans.

But here in San Francisco, with a long line of passengers blundering down the jet way, and more behind, and the hopes of my connecting flight fading with each passing minute, I was in a less-forgiving mood. The gentleman assigned to inspect my bags was likewise afflicted. He was a short, stout Asian and he opened my suitcase and immediately began raking his fingers through my belongings. I’d brought only a few clothes, and I was wearing most of them, in anticipation of Boston’s winter weather. What he was really doing was mauling my sad, strange collection of candy bars.

I wasn’t questioning his right to inspect my bag. This was how Americans had chosen to react to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Rather than asking ourselves why a bunch of pious lunatics hated us so much, we hired security guards to sift through our bags. These minor mortifications made us feel safe, and seemed a fair penance for not having been blown up, and for living in such unconscionable comfort.

The other passengers, passing by, looked upon this spectacle with weary curiosity, while I stood on the carpet in my socks. What, I wondered, did he expect to find? Anthrax spores in my Valomilk? A little hidden bomb in my Idaho Spud? Surely, if I’d packed my suitcase with Snickers bars and Hershey’s Kisses, there would have been no such mucking about. I felt like saying to this fellow,
Look here: these candy bars you’re tossing around, they are a link to our glorious past, to the underdog entrepreneurial spirit that is the finest manifestation of capitalism. It is the bullying voraciousness of the big companies, the need for total worldwide brand domination, that has made America a symbol of greed and an object of derision
. This was probably nonsense, but it felt true at the moment, and it was something to occupy my mind while the rest of the plane filled up with tired travelers.

I managed to catch my connection in Chicago. They held the plane and I scampered through Midway airport and felt an odd sense of good fortune, gratitude even, at the obscene miracles of modern travel.

A FEW FINAL RELEVANT FACTS

1. After visiting the Annabelle factory, I did drive back to Palo Alto, mostly so I could have dinner with my grandfather Gabriel Almond. He was the last of my grandparents, a worldfamous political scientist whose wife had, quite abruptly, died on him two years earlier.

My brothers and I spent a lot of time at his house when we were kids, swimming in the pool out back. Of the house itself, I remember most vividly a high cupboard in the kitchen where he and my grandmother kept cookies in a variety of metal boxes whose precise shapes and colors I can still see if I close my eyes. He had something of a sweet tooth, in other words, which he had passed down to his son Richard, and on down to me. I should note that the adoption of a brown spaniel puppy named Snickers had provided him immeasurable solace as a widower.

Dinner was fine. Gabe was a man of considerable charm and he took an interest in my literary pursuits, having been an exceedingly (annoyingly) prolific writer himself. But afterwards, as I drove him back to the little apartment where he had recently moved, a cloud of despair descended on us both. He was depressed by the disappearance of his wife and the home they had made together. The various medications intended to soothe his heart had gummed the powerful gears of his mind. He was too tired to pretend otherwise. Outside, the storm was outrageous. The wind knocked at the windows and made the panes moan. We sat for a while in that darkened apartment and it felt to me as if the keepers of our sadness, those lonely little men who live behind the heart, were calling out to one another:
I am here! I am here! Are you there? Are you there?

“What’s this new project about?” Gabe said finally.

I told him it was about candy bars. But I didn’t know if I could explain what I was really getting at: that candy had been my only dependable succor as a child, that it had, in a sense saved my life, that I hoped to draw a link between my personal nostalgia and the cultural yearning for a simpler age, but that, in the end, the laws of the candy world were the laws of the broader world: the strong survived, the weak struggled, people sought pleasure to endure their pain.

Snickers whimpered in his sleep and Gabe reached down to rub his neck.

“Actually,” I said, “you make a cameo in the book.”

“Is that so?”

I told him the Necco story, how he used to send his oldest son out with six cents to buy the Sunday
New York Times
and how his son would lose a penny down the sewer so he could buy himself Necco wafers.

“Did he?” Gramps gazed at me with his soft brown eyes. “I didn’t know that.” He slowly yielded himself to a smile, the last one of his I would ever see. “Well, good for him.”

2. Back in Boston, I decided to throw a candy-tasting party. I felt it was important that my friends have a chance to taste the strange harvest of my journey. I went so far as to slice the bars into bite-size pieces and lay them out on a cutting board. My fantasy was that people would sample each piece and offer witty bons mots, which I could then steal and use for this very book. Unfortunately, I run with a pretty flaky crowd, sweet people to be sure, but not terribly organized. There was also some drinking that happened and some smoking of pot, and this tended to
impair the evaluative process
. My own notes from the party are not much help to me now. Here is a sample:

blair says u-no like crayon
nice finish (george)
spud spackle, yeah, spackle
I caulk the line (johnny cash?)

Much of the focus of the party was on the unique shape of the Twin Bings. Comparisons were made, both verbal and visual, to the male reproductive organs. I let it slip that Marty Palmer referred to legumes as nutmeats (this seemed germane) and things went downhill from there. I woke the next morning to find that the remains of my candy bars had been arranged, on my kitchen table, in a pornographic tableau.

There was, however, one happy by-product of this gathering. In a moment of freak inspiration, I decided to place a Haviland Thin Mint between two pieces of a dark chocolate Kit Kat. What happened was this: my teeth sent the crisp cookies plunging into the gooey mint, the two chocolates melted into a bittersweet swirl, and my tongue—my tongue went into multiple orgasms. It was the very day after this party that I decided to buy an entire case of Kit Kat Darks—twelve boxes of 36. When I went to pick up this case from a local candy wholesaler, the receptionist told me her phone had been ringing off the hook with requests. Hershey’s had discontinued production, of course. Nonetheless, the bar had achieved cult status.

3. Several weeks after my visit, on Christmas Day in fact, my grandfather died. So I got on a plane and flew back to California for the memorial. This was a somber event, full of the sort of muffled sorrow and confusion that ensues when a patriarch dies. That night, I drove with my older brother, Dave, up to his home in Napa. I wanted to visit my nephews, Daniel, age two and a half, and Lorenzo, fourteen months, or, as they are generally referred to these days, the Wrecking Crew. (Dave prefers the designation Team Head Contusion.)

Strangely, almost creepily, Dave has never shown much interest in candy. Even as a little kid, I can remember him eating half a candy bar and then simply losing interest. I remember this because I was always hoping to chickenhawk his remains and because I was continually thwarted in this endeavor by Dave, who, come to think of it, may have been feigning disinterest simply to torture me. But no, he really is one of those sad cases who feels no sense of urgency in the presence of candy. Worse still, his wife, Lisa, has been pretty hardcore about not allowing the Wrecking Crew to eat processed sugar. My concern, obviously, is that the freak bloodlines are looking pretty watery right about now. My saving grace is that Daniel recently discovered jelly beans. I, of course, had noticed the sign for the Jelly Belly factory (
FREE TOURS DAILY
!) just a few miles outside of Napa.