“I’ve never seen kids with so many pimples so young. You both eat too much chocolate: candy, cookies, ice cream. Ach. You’re going to have a lot of trouble later on.”
I have a very vivid memory of my father saying this to me and my sister, and although there was a definite element of truth in what he said—in fifth grade I already had to avoid red shirts because they had the effect of extending the field of my inflammation—I’ve often wondered what could possibly have caused him to predict such a dismal future for his children. What would have been his motivation—self-laceration taking the ritual form of infanticide? A father’s laudable anger at his children’s early expulsion from paradise? A discomfiting plea aimed at getting us to step up our remedial techniques? Who knows?
My sophomore year of high school my zit problem reached such catastrophic proportions that once a month I drove an hour each way to receive liquid-nitrogen treatments from an impressively serious dermatologist in South San Francisco. His office was catty-corner to a shopping center that housed a Longs drugstore, where I would always first give my prescription for that month’s miracle drug to the pharmacist. Then, while I was waiting for the prescription to be filled, I’d go buy a giant bag of Switzer’s red licorice. Not the cheap cherry version so much in favor now, though. The darker stuff: claret-colored. I’d tear open the bag, and even if—especially if—my face was still bleeding slightly from all the violence that had just been done to it, I’d start gobbling the licorice while standing in line for the cashier. This may sound a little gooey, but looking back, I’m hard-pressed now to see the licorice as anything other than some sort of Communion wafer—as if by swallowing the licorice, my juicy red pimples might become sweet and tasty. I’d absorb them; I’d be absolved. The purity of the contradiction I remember as a kind of ecstasy.
My senior yearbook photo was so airbrushed that people asked me, literally, who it was.
Well, time heals all wounds; so they say. This isn’t even remotely true. Time passes, they say. This is true. Ten, twelve, fifteen years passed:
I craved a bag of claret-colored licorice and couldn’t find one anywhere, so I wrote to Switzer’s, in St. Louis: Wither the good licorice of yesteryear? “Per your inquiry,” Bart Kercher, Quality Control Manager, wrote back, “our St. Louis facility produces Switzer’s licorice candy, Switzer’s red candy, Good & Plenty candy, and Good ’n Fruity candy. The ‘claret-colored’ Switzer’s candy that you speak of was produced by a ‘batch’ cooking operation. Our plant has been modernized, and we currently have a continuous cooking system for greater candy uniformity.”
A couple of weeks later, a large envelope arrived, bearing Switzer’s largesse—licorice whips, strips, bits, Good & Plenty. I ripped open the bags and boxes and chewed and chewed.