True Confections (32 page)

There are some pornographic images on the Web, involving a sex-crazed Little Susie with two very well-endowed Little Sammies having their way with her. Julie tells me Little Susie threesomes will be on the Web until the end of time. They are horribly easy to find now, in any case. There are endless numbers of obscene videos of crudely animated Little Sammies and Little Susies in motion, on YouTube and elsewhere, and there are thousands of images on the Web that all seem to follow the same format, with one white something between two dark somethings (kittens, shoes, cows in a field, wine bottles, cars, etc.), captioned with the implicitly suggestive punch line, “Say, Dat’s Tasty!”

Some of the videos of animated figures remind me of the awkward Claymation of
Gumby
television shows of my childhood.
(Gumby’s mother was Gumba, and his father was Gumbo.) If you soften Little Sammies briefly in the microwave, they become temporarily pliable, though the coating will lose its gloss when it cools. I imagine this is what was done for the porno Little Sammies; their fudgy genitals were sculpted out of parts of other Little Sammies and stuck on their bodies while they were still warm.

Loose Little Susies and unopened Little Susies–stickered Little Sammies packs that we gave away at the CandyCon were a hot eBay item for a while, and there were even, weirdly enough (think of the effort involved), some counterfeits.

The blogger who started the whole thing—Leonard Blatt is his actual name, but being an ironic hipster with literary pretensions, on his blog, Kretschmar’s Lunch, he is known as Vivian Darkbloom—has made quite the name for himself with his particular brand of deadpan prudery. At the peak of the Little Susies nightmare, he wrote me an email to tell me that he had really enjoyed Little Susies, and was very sorry that his actions had contributed to their being unavailable indefinitely. He offered to begin a “Bring Back Little Susies!” blog campaign, but I emailed him back to tell him he had done enough.

W
E DID NOT HAVE
enough private resources, Howard and I, to enrich our shared life. I loved him with all my heart, such as it is, but he never loved me with all of his. Howard chose to reserve his most private and precious resources a world away, while I poured my heart and soul into Zip’s Candies and the Ziplinsky family, thinking we were in it together, for life. The maintenance of an enduring marriage is a process sensitive to both time and temperature. You have to balance and maintain the heat over the years. Too much heat can melt even tigers, as we know. But we had a good, rich life, one that could have endured. Of course, over time, there are infinite adjustments to
make, and make again. It always comes down to time and temperature. Good tempering is essential for durability. A badly tempered marriage becomes dull and brittle, and then it breaks.

H
OWARD
, H
OWARD
, H
OWARD.
The love of my life is a shmuck (who taught me the word
shmuck
). The love of my life turns out to be Carson McCullers’s “most mediocre person,” who can be the object of a love which is “wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp.”

I
AM SORRY
about the Little Sammies I put in the gas tank of Howard’s ridiculous Porsche Boxster in the Zip’s Candies parking lot the week before he left. I take full responsibility for the expense involved in replacing all the engine parts that were clogged when the dissolved Little Sammies passed through the fuel injector as Howard was driving on the Wilbur Cross Parkway. However, I take no responsibility for the added inconvenience and expense of the car’s breaking down inside the West Rock Tunnel, which would not have happened if he had followed my advice to avoid the parkway, especially in the late afternoon, and instead, when driving from East Rock to the Yale Golf Course, always to take Morse Street to Fitch Street to Fountain Street. How many times have I told him that this is the best route?

Also, I shouldn’t have put Howard’s Patek Philippe watch in the Cuisinart. I was frustrated, but it was wrong. I will pay for another if it is important to Howard that even if he no longer cares to know the day of the week, he has an insanely overpriced watch that offers “timeless aesthetic perfection,” and is “not merely a method of telling time [but also] a silent statement
about your values,” a watch that has “the ability to create an emotional response.” Instead of, you know, a Timex or something.

My willingness to accept responsibility for these two uncharacteristically destructive and immature actions, which I took at a moment of extreme emotional distress, should be considered further proof of my honesty and integrity.

The most fundamental business philosophy Sam ever told me to write down, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it” and “There’s no use crying over spilled milk,” are useless beliefs when it comes to running Zip’s Candies. Our philosophy must be: first cross every possible bridge in your imagination. And spilled milk is the only kind worth crying over.

H
OWARD TOOK A
little more than four hundred thousand dollars of company funds out of the business over the last four years. He tried to hide this theft and spread it around through various accounts, but after he left for Madagascar, the company books turned out to be a big, sugarcoated mess. After one meeting, I cut loose Howard’s sleazy friend and accountant (and accomplice), the despicable Marty Shapiro, and hired a new accountant as part of my effort to pull Zip’s Candies together.

Casper Weisswasser is probably a high-functioning autistic of some kind. He’s a cross between Kaspar Hauser and Casper the Friendly Ghost. Large and pale and awkward, he seems surprised by ordinary clichés, as if he has never heard anyone say anything like “When it rains it pours” or “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” He was amazed when I told him his name means “white water.” He speaks in a slightly loud monotone, as if making announcements in a bus station through a PA system, and he identifies himself to me in full every time he phones, even if we have already spoken several times within the hour. Casper has
that perfect accountant’s obsessive ability to make order out of disorder. Order, disorder, counterorder. That’s what Sam always said when a line broke down. That’s how I live my life.

The money Howard took apparently seeped into his Madagascar bank accounts in increments, laundered through various Czaplinsky accounts, with padded billing and duplicate payments. I am not going to make any claims about the money now. I don’t want to hurt the Bao-Bar venture, and the business relationship between Ziplinsky and Czaplinsky interests is too valuable to damage that way. The money signifies to me (the way a dagger in the heart signifies), because it tells me how long it has been since Howard had any intention of staying here, in his Connecticut life with me. I now realize that he left me long before he actually left.

The stolen money is spilled milk, a minor spill in the larger scheme of things, the kind worth shedding just a few tears over, to be sure, especially when I think about the ways I have juggled shifts to keep the lines running at maximum efficiency, and shaved expenditures all over the plant, and bargained with all of our suppliers so hard that Manny Feldman, who sells us our corn syrup and sugar complained to me a few months ago, “You really Jewed me down on that last order.”

S
AM SUGGESTED THAT
I become a notary public, which I did, twenty years ago. It’s a useful thing for any business, having an in-house notary. He also encouraged me to learn how to do his signature perfectly, which was useful for signing checks, or if anything else came up requiring authorization, when he and Frieda were in Deerfield Beach every February for so many years. You see how much he trusted me? It was our little secret.

T
HE
Z
IP’S
C
ANDIES
fire occurred on a Sunday, when I knew I was unlikely to be detected, because I wanted to burn a large quantity of papers efficiently and discreetly. I used two of the three empty fifty-gallon drums that were on the loading dock. I didn’t use the third one because it had a couple of inches of liquid in the bottom, which I assumed, erroneously as it turned out, was rainwater. It is beyond obvious that I was not in any way trying to cause damage to the premises of Zip’s Candies, or I would not have set a fire out on the loading dock when I had full access to every corner of the building and could have in fact burned the place to the ground very efficiently if I so chose, by setting the fire in the basement.

When the third drum blew up, igniting everything on the loading dock, the only damage to the building was to the roof overhang on the loading dock, which was in terrible condition anyway, and had been patched and patched again over the years. A mess of framing and plywood with several layers of buckling tar-paper patches laid down haphazardly for quick rainwater leak prevention (Howard’s management style, not mine), the roof got scorched when a stack of wooden pallets ignited.

I have had an intention for quite a while now to reroof our entire premises with standing seam metal, perhaps in a cheerful green to echo the Zip’s umbrella, which is of course an echo of Little Black Sambo’s green umbrella. The cost of new roofing would be approximately a hundred thousand dollars, however, and it is not in our budget at this time. We lost the original Zip’s Candies “Say, Dat’s Tasty!” sign, too, the only serious loss from the explosion. I do think the fire would have burned out on its own even if the fire department hadn’t responded to a 911 call
from someone who saw the black smoke rising and thought the empty Bigelow Boiler complex beside us was on fire.

The Zip’s Candies building stands on ground with an ironic (to me) history. The corner of James Street and River Street lies at the edge of a filled swamp old maps call Grapevine Point. This very corner was the site of the administration building for Camp Terry, which was a compound of nine barracks erected to house Connecticut’s two Colored Civil War Regiments, the 29th and the 30th, while they were trained for battle. (Today the parade ground is Criscuolo Park.) Governor William Alfred Buckingham brokered the sale of the land to the U.S. Army by Yale University, in order to avoid the risk of colored troops, armed with rifles, being drilled on the New Haven Green, where many other Connecticut regiments had been trained. After the war ended, the army disposed of the property, and the Bigelow Boiler complex of buildings was erected on the site. Thirty years later, the Peet brothers bought one of the smaller Bigelow buildings for their short-lived enterprise.

T
HOSE FIFTY-GALLON DRUMS
had held Czaplinsky Pure Madagascar Vanilla, which is highly inflammable, being two-hundred-proof ethyl alcohol. The drums should not have been left on the loading dock like that, especially not unrinsed, and with one of them containing several inches of vanilla extract. It was an extraordinarily careless waste of one of the most expensive commodities we use, and I am conducting an investigation to find the person who deemed that drum empty. The stacked wooden shipping pallets should have been disposed of properly or recycled, not left to pile up like that on our loading dock. Also, the decaying roof on the loading dock should have been replaced with a standing seam metal overhang years ago, even if
we weren’t ready to reroof the entire building, but Howard kept deferring the expense.

That all these elements of danger were present on the loading dock demonstrates to me that I have failed to maintain the high management standards that should always govern Zip’s Candies. It should have been perfectly safe for me to burn documents in those two drums, undetected, without mishap. The material safety data sheet on Czaplinsky’s Pure Madagascar Vanilla says: “Pure vanilla has a flash point of 60 degrees Fahrenheit. The flammable limits are in the upper 19 percent. The product is highly flammable in the presence of open flames and sparks. The risks of explosions of the product are low. Containers should be grounded. Vanilla extract may burn with a near-invisible flame. Vapor may travel considerable distance to source of ignition and flashback.”

Admittedly, I wasn’t thinking about that when I lit fire to those papers. But I maintain that if all three drums had been empty and rinsed, the fire would have burned uneventfully, and my actions would have gone undetected. I take full responsibility for the fire getting out of control as it did. There are no bad soldiers, only bad officers.