Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (4 page)

This is what I love about Halloween. It has, from a freak perspective, purity of intent. There’s no dallying about with God, or that contrived brand of devotion used to justify our other seasonal pageants of gluttony. There’s something incredibly liberating about a holiday that
encourages
children to take candy from strangers.

Today, of course, our paranoia about child safety has reached this fabulous zenith whereby kids are only allowed to trick-or-treat accompanied by an adult and each piece of received candy is promptly and assiduously inspected with a metal detector and/or chemical toxicity kit. I watch the kids tromping about my neighborhood with their hawkeyed chaperones and I feel sorry for the poor little dudes. They hit maybe five houses an hour because the parents make each stop a little event, with thank-yous and much time spent admiring costumes and discussing the truly atrocious crimes that might befall children at any moment in these woeful days of ruination.

But back in the blithe, porno-soaked, latch-key seventies, the idea of trick-or-treating with a parent in tow was unthinkable—like publicly disclosing a preference for Barry Manilow. And yes, we heard plenty of tales about creepy old men sinking razors into caramel apples. But this only added an allure of risk to the endeavor. (As Bobby Hankey used to put it:
Don’t bite down if the blade is facing outward, dickweed
.) We enjoyed the prospect of visiting iffy-looking houses and apartment complexes, because the people there had no sense of proportion and they led lives of mystery, amid their mysterious smells, and we could peek inside their homes at the strange artwork and the absence of furniture, and occasionally some guy would open the door in his underwear and throw quarters at us. This is how we learned about the world.

For the true freak, Halloween was all about game-planning. You couldn’t just wander around, because you had a threehour window and every minute counted and more important than that you had this remarkable concept known as Freak Amnesty, which meant, on this one evening, that you were allowed to gather and consume as much candy as you could without parental objection.

Come 6:30, I knew exactly where I was headed: up Wilkie Way toward Charleston, north onto Alma and back around to Meadow, with detours onto the densely packed streets surrounding Ventura, then to the skeezy apartments on James. I stayed away from fancy costumes, as these provoked discussion, and discussion was not what you wanted. You wanted a quick exchange. One year, I wrapped a bed sheet around me and went as … what? A Roman. A mummy. Origami. It was never quite clear.

I raced from house to house, sore-shouldered and gasping, past the idiotic pumpkin smashers and egg chuckers, to the lit doorsteps, where a basket of candy would be presented for my princely consideration. So I proceeded until ten, with special emphasis on that final hour, when the crowds thin out and the benefactors, having invariably overstocked and now fretting the surplus, grow exorbitant.

Now: I’m a great lover of visual art and I will happily discuss the color and texture of Van Gogh’s
Starry Night
, or the way in which the eye is led into Goya’s
The Third of May 1808
, and even though I don’t really know what I’m talking about, I can get myself awfully worked up, just as a fine sentence or paragraph (say, the opening salvo of
Henderson the Rain King
) can send me into shivery rapture. But I can think of nothing on earth so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night, which, for me, was ten to fifteen pounds of candy, a riot of colored wrappers and hopeful fonts, snub-nosed chocolate bars and SweeTARTS, the seductive rattle of Jujyfruits and Good & Plenty and lollipop sticks all akimbo, the foil ends of mini LifeSavers packs twinkling like dimes, and a thick sugary perfume rising up from the pillowcase.

And more so, the pleasure of pouring out the contents onto the rug in the TV room, of cataloging the take according to a strict Freak Hierarchy, calling for all chocolate products to be immediately quarantined, sorted, and closely guarded, with higher-quality fruit chews and caramels next, then hard candies, and last of all anything organic (the loathsome raisins). A brief period of barter with my brothers might ensue. For the most part, I simply lay amid my trove and occasionally massed the candy into a pile which I could sort of dive into, à la Scrooge McDuck and his gold ducats.

Again: I realize I was sick.

For me, the crisis arose at about age fourteen, when it occurred to me that I was at least a foot taller than the other trick-or-treaters and that my elaborately polite pleas for candy were now being viewed as a kind of extortion.

MISTAKES WERE MADE

I hope I haven’t made my desires sound indiscriminate. They are not. When I disapprove of a candy, the sentiment often veers into wrath. A part of me wants to take the manufacturers by the short hairs and bitchslap some sense into them, though the real issue, obviously, is demand. It’s the consumers who are responsible, in the end, for the abominations of the Freak Kingdom.

The one candy whose success is most puzzling to me is Twizzlers. Twizzlers is basically an imitation of red licorice, which, itself, has no cognate in the natural world. The defenders of this candy will probably object at this point, arguing that the most popular Twizzlers flavor is actually strawberry. In fact, Twizzlers bears roughly the same chemical relationship to strawberry as the Vienna Sausage does to filet mignon. Which is to say: none. Its flavor is so completely artificial that I’ve often wondered if the production staff might not endeavor to make it just a little more artificial, thus crossing over an invisible flavor threshold and allowing the product to start tasting
less
artificial. This is to say nothing of the Twizzlers texture, which falls somewhere between chitin and rain poncho.

As a former Tangy Taffy user, I realize that I’m not exactly on solid ground as an arbiter of taste. But I can at least plead youthful indiscretion on that count, whereas I continue to encounter grown men and women (some of them otherwise desirable) who blithely chomp at their Twizzlers cud, breathing their plasticine reek onto the rest of us.

To me, Twizzlers belongs to the same loathsome genus as the Jujubes. The young and fortunate reader may not have heard of Jujubes, and this candy will be hard to describe in a fashion that makes it sound suitable for human consumption. They were basically hard pellets the size and shape of pencil erasers. Indeed, if one were to set Jujubes beside pencil erasers in a blind taste test, it would be tough to make a distinction, except that pencil erasers have more natural fruit flavor.

These are two examples of candies I refer to as MWMs (Mistakes Were Made). Other would include:

Marshmallow Peeps
: A candy that encourages the notion that it is acceptable to eat child offspring. Composed of marshmallow dyed piss yellow and sprinkled with sugar.

Circus Peanuts
: Again, a marshmallow pretending to be something else, this time a legume. An affront to elephants everywhere.

Boston Baked Beans
: If you are an actual peanut, why are you not covered in chocolate? Why are you covered, instead, in some kind of burnt-tasting brick red shell? Is the idea that you resemble a baked bean supposed to make you more alluring?

Jordan Almonds
: Who chose the color scheme, Zsa Zsa Gabor?

Chuckles
: A fruit jelly the consistency of cartilage. Explain.

Sixlets
: Those of us over the age of, say, three can usually differentiate between chocolate and brown wax.

White jelly beans
: I defy you to tell me what flavor white is supposed to signify. Pineapple? Coconut? Isopropyl?

Lime LifeSavers
: The LifeSavers people haven’t figured out by now that no one likes this flavor?

Coconut
: We now come to an area where I depart from the rational and enter the realm of the phobic. Oddly, it isn’t the flavor of coconut that troubles me, but the texture, and specifically that stringy residue utterly impervious to the normal processes of digestion. In short, I feel as if I’m chewing on a sweetened cuticle. Anyone who’s eaten a Mounds knows exactly what I’m talking about. The chocolate and corn syrup dissolve quickly enough and one is left with those stubborn fibers which lurk in the mouth and, eventually, maroon themselves in the crannies of one’s teeth. The exceptions to this embargo are products in which the coconut is either toasted or combined with other crunchy ingredients, thus obscuring the cuticle effect. The example that comes to mind is the brash and ridiculous Chick-OStick, a wand of peanut butter encased in brittle and sprinkled with toasted coconut.

White chocolate
: When I was eight or nine years old I flew from California to New York with my twin brother, Mike. We were unchaperoned and therefore doted on by the stewardesses, who snuck us each a special dessert from first class: a white chocolate lollipop. I wolfed mine down and, shortly thereafter, got violently ill. This was mortifying at the time. In retrospect, I’m sort of proud of myself.

Vomiting strikes me as proper response to white chocolate, which is, in fact,
not
chocolate (as it contains no cocoa) but a scourge visited upon us by the inimical forces of Freak Evil.

2

CARAVELLE: AN ELEGY

Art arises from loss. I wish this weren’t the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that is not what happens. What happens is we lie around in bed eating chocolate and screwing. Art is what happens when things don’t work out, when you’re licking your wounds. Art is, to a larger extent than people would like to think, a productive licking of the wounds.

Loss, after all, leads rather naturally to the quest. The Greeks want Helen. Odysseus wants to get home (eventually). Dante wants Beatrice. Ahab wants the whale. Proust wants his cookies. And so on.

In the instant case, this entire book arose from the loss of a single candy bar. I am speaking of the Caravelle, though for many years I had no name to attach to this want. I had only memories. I had myself, at the age of nine or so, anxious, be -reft, on a bus downtown to meet the therapist assigned the dubious task of restoring my capacity for self-love, and I had Mac’s Smoke Shop, where all the essential vices were gathered in the smoky, crepuscular gloom with men who were somehow lesser versions of my father, sad and preoccupied, right there next to me but totally out of reach, and where a glorious central rack of candy, which was, in turn, gathered around this one candy bar in its bright yellow wrapper. It cost a quarter. There were two pieces per pack.

What was the Caravelle? It was a strip of caramel covered in a thick shell of milk chocolate, which was embedded with crisped rice. Yes, I know. That’s the 100 Grand. But no one with even the dullest palate could ever have confused the two. The chocolate in the 100 Grand is mild and crumbly. The crisped rice is mealy and deflated. The caramel is the color of a washed-out varnish. And the balance is all wrong. There simply isn’t enough chocolate or crisped rice to sustain the salivary breakdown. As a result, you wind up with a mouthful of rubbery caramel.

The Caravelle tasted more like a pastry: the chocolate was thicker, darker, full-bodied, and the crisped rise had a malty flavor and what I want to call structural integrity; the caramel was that rarest variety, dark and lustrous and supple, with hints of fudge. More so, there was a sense of the piece
yielding
to the mouth. By which I mean, one had to work the teeth through the sturdy chocolate shell, which gave way with a distinct, moist snap, through the crisped rice (thus releasing a second, grainy bouquet), and only then into the soft caramel core. Oh, that inimitable combination of textures! That symphony of flavors! And how they offered themselves to the heat and wetness of the mouth—the sensation of the crisped rice drenched in melted chocolate, chomped by the molars into the creamy swirl of caramel. Oh, woe and pity unto thee who never tasted this bar! True woe! True pity!

Around the time I was starting high school, Cadbury acquired Peter Paul and the Caravelle was discontinued. I didn’t know this, of course. All I knew was that the best candy bar in the world was
gone
. And I went looking for the Caravelle everywhere. After a while, I couldn’t even remember the name of the bar, which meant that I spent countless hours describing it to one or another bemused shopkeeper, girlfriend, therapist. Strangers at parties. Potential muggers. I was frantic, inconsolable,
really
annoying.

The disappearance of the Caravelle led me to the larger question: How is it that a candy bar, an absolutely sensational candy bar, can be banished to oblivion? How can the lovers of caramel and chocolate and crisped rice be left to satisfy themselves with the mealy indelicacy of the 100 Grand? This was an outrage, on par with VHS crushing Beta, a clear-cut consumer injustice perpetrated by that wonderful open market we’re all so careful to abide.

It should be clear, at this point, that I’m more or less out of my mind. But so are you. Because every one of you has some form of the Freak within you, has sought the succor of sweets in a moment of trauma, has attached some sacred set of memories to the small, attainable pleasures of candy. Because everyone, as a child, had the same basic wiring and that wiring ran directly from the id to the freak to the memory bank, because our most cogent memory triggers—our senses of smell and taste—are the ones most closely associated with the experience of the world in our mouths.

And this is why, when I bring up candy at a party or to a colleague or to the guy who comes to check the gas meter, there is this immediate outpouring of memories, confessions, opinions, regrets, which doesn’t happen when I bring up other hobbies of mine, such as bridge.

A few years ago, my friends began urging me to write a book about candy. Their reasoning ran as follows: Maybe if Steve
writes
about candy, he will
shut up
about candy. I didn’t listen to these suggestions, of course, because I’m fairly stubborn and because, at the time, I considered candy to be a subject unworthy of my artistic consideration, meaning that I might actually enjoy writing such a book and thus automatically violate the serious young writer’s credo:
Suffer at all times, preferably in such a manner as to convey to the rest of the world just how much you’re suffering
. So I went about my business of suffering, flamboyantly, with much deep-hearted kvetching to the proper maternal surrogates.

A couple of years ago, though, I was driving down Massachusetts Avenue and I noticed, for perhaps the 500th time, the giant chimney atop the New England Confectionery Company, which is painted in the style of a giant package of Necco wafers, and I thought of my dear old pop and his ancient Necco jones and, well, I didn’t do anything.

But then, a week later, I was driving through east Cambridge and I saw this run-down factory with a sign painted on the side that read
SQUIRREL NUT BRAND
. This was a terribly sad sight, because, though the place was all chipped brick and broken windows, the lettering itself was bright and hopeful. It reminded me of the giant red Schrafft’s sign that still lords over Charlestown and how, years ago, Schrafft’s had been the big kahuna of the boxed chocolates world, and how the sign is just a curiosity today, a little local color affixed to the top of a building filled with software companies. It began to dawn on me, in other words, that Boston, my adopted city, had something of an untold freak history.

When I called Squirrel Nut to find out what had happened, a friendly man named Bob Stengal answered the phone. He explained that he had been the general manager of Squirrel Nut Brands since 1970, but that he no longer served in that capacity because the company had been bought out and relocated to Texas, of all places, and though he wished the new owners the best of luck, you could tell that the whole scenario bummed him out.

The Squirrel Nut Zippers are perhaps best known these days as a band that played neoflapper music, music I spent several years trying quite hard (and never quite successfully) to enjoy. The original Squirrel Nut Zipper is a caramel nut chew, which has been in production since 1888. “We made one of the best taffies in the industry,” Bob told me. “It chewed beautifully. A good taffy should be soft enough to pull without snapping. Why, you could pull ours forever.”

I myself could attest to this. I had eaten several thousand Nut Zippers, because my optometrist stocked them in his candy bowl, meaning I ate twelve to fifteen during the course of an average visit, more if he had to replace my nose pads.

Before signing on with Squirrel Nut, Bob had been a shortening salesman, an occupation I hadn’t realized existed previous to our discussion, but which, nonetheless, lent him a rather intimate acquaintance with the city’s candyscape. Back in the fifties, he told me, four factories had operated near the old Coast Guard station, off Atlantic Avenue downtown—Royal, Cole, Haviland, and Liberty—pumping the smell of chocolate over the North End all day long. Main Street in Cambridge was known as Confectioner’s Row. The entire street was candy makers: James O. Welch (Junior Mints), Jack Smiley (hard candies), Graylock Confection (Tweet), Dagget (chocolates), Fox-Cross (Charleston Chew). One by one, these companies fell on hard times. The managers would call Stengal to discuss their problems. Should they sell out? Should they relocate? Pretty soon Squirrel Nut was the last independent, family-owned candy company in Boston.

I decided to visit Bob at his home, in Concord. He was a trim fellow, with neatly cropped white hair and a sweet, rabbity face. He showed me a bunch of memorabilia from his years with the company: awards, pictures of him with the owners, trade show programs going yellow at the edges. “I guess I was in denial right until they moved,” Bob said. “I didn’t empty my desk until two weeks before they shut the place down. By the end, I didn’t even
have
a desk. I was balancing a pad on my knee to take notes. They’d shut the utilities off, so it was dark. I remember I went up to the fourth floor of the factory and there was this echo. All the machines were gone. And I realized: this is just a shell now. Because, you know, when the factory was running, every floor had its own sounds. And when you were on the first floor, you could hear them all together, all those machines and people. It was like an orchestra.”

You don’t have to be a genius to see how a guy like Bob might shake me up. All that freak, all that loss.

But what I really needed was what little Charlie Bucket needed: to get myself inside a factory. I called over to Necco and got patched through to Walter Marshall, Vice President of Corporate Planning/Logistics, which translates as the Guy Who Has to Deal with All the Media Hassles, of whom I was hardly the most pressing. On the day I visited him, Marshall was anticipating a visit from Martha Stewart, the prescandal Martha, who wanted to talk with him about what had become Necco’s most popular product, the Conversation Heart.

These are the little colored hearts that flood the market at Valentine’s and carry messages such as
KISS ME
and
LOVER BOY
. Every year, Necco organized a ceremony at which Marshall—who was, in a promotional flourish exquisitely unsuited to his laconic demeanor, known as the King of Hearts—unveiled a new slogan. (This was Necco’s effort to keep up with the times, and while I could appreciate the bid for free publicity, some of the more recent efforts had been less than titillating—
FAX ME
, for example.)

Marshall was in a tizzy. He was wearing a lab coat with his name stitched above the breast pocket and a tie knotted a bit too tightly, and the lab coat fluttered behind him as he whisked around the corporate offices of Necco. He settled behind his desk, a desk littered with candy hearts and memos regarding candy hearts, and fixed me with a look of not-quite-concealed impatience. “Alright, here’s the story of how I got into the candy business,” he said, though I had not yet asked him how he got into the candy business.

Marshall’s father, it turned out, had been a traffic cop in front of the Schrafft’s building. So Marshall landed himself a summer job in 1953 and stayed with the company for 25 years, working his way up to Executive Vice President/General Manager. He joined Necco in 1987 and was now, he reported, “in the twilight of a mediocre career.” I found this odd. Here was a man who could take an elevator down one flight and order an entire run of chocolatecovered turtles and take them home with him. This did not strike me as the prerogative of a mediocre career.

Whatever his self-esteem issues, Marshall possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s confectionery past, which began in 1765, when an Irish immigrant named John Hannon established America’s first chocolate mill on the banks of the Neponset River in Dorchester. Marshall himself was born in Dorchester and used to walk by that factory every day. “You could almost taste the chocolate in the air,” he said. The earliest candy companies in Boston were roadside operations. They cooked stuff up in the kitchen and sold it out front. The proximity of the chocolate mill, two sugar refineries, not to mention a sizable population, made the city a confectionery hub. With the introduction of the steam engine, local companies began producing the first candy-making machines. Foremost among these was Oliver R. Chase’s lozenge cutter, which began producing the wafers later known as Neccos in 1847. They were a staple of the Union soldiers who fought in the Civil War. In 1901, Chase bought two other companies and dubbed his outfit the New England Confectionery Company, the world’s first candy conglomerate.

The first half of the twentieth century was, Marshall assured me, Boston’s freak zenith. The city was home to 140 candy companies by 1950, with sales of $200 million per year. Necco’s Sky Bar—a slab of milk chocolate infused with four distinct fillings—was among the most popular bars on the East Coast. When World War II ended, all the New York papers ran stories reporting that the famous Sky Bar billboard in Times Square was finally illuminated again.

The beginning of the end for Boston came with the rise of the national candy conglomerates: Hershey’s and Mars. They understood that distribution had changed. Mom-and-pop stores were on the wane. Manufacturers had to connect with the big chains. And they had to be more centrally located, so they could ship nationwide.

Unable to compete with the candy giants, Necco flirted with insolvency during the sixties. The company’s execs realized they were going to have to grow to survive and began buying up struggling competitors. There was no shortage: Candy House Buttons, maker of those curious strips of colored candy dots on wax paper. Stark, Necco’s only competitor in the wafer and candy heart world, and producers of the old-school peanut butter taffy known as the Mary Jane. Great American Brands, best known for its Haviland chocolates. And, just last year, the venerable Clark Bar Company of Pittsburgh. What Necco had amassed, not entirely on purpose, was a retro candy empire.

Marshall looked up from his desk. He was done with his lecture. Martha Stewart was, presumably, waiting in the wings. (
FAX ME
!) The moment of truth had now arrived.

“I’d like to tour the factory,” I said.