Somewhere along the line, the Oh Henry! became my favourite chocolate bar. I cannot account for how this happened. It was certainly not one of my favourites growing up, the “fudge” inside so unlike the dense brown-sugar fudges of my mother, the gummy chocolate varieties of my friends’ parents,1 or the creamy yet resilient fudge one bought from old women at the flea market along with those lollipops that were just a lobster-shaped piece of chocolate on a stick (a regionalism, surely). There was something so very dull-seeming about the Oh Henry!, like a lumpy, unfinished, poor man’s Turtle (or would that be the GooGoo Cluster?). I must have been more of a wafer man, because I remember Kit Kat and Coffee Crisp jockeying for the favoured position much of my young life.
Now, in the twilight of my youth (or, arguably, the loathsome murky dawn of my middle age, depending on how long I expect to keep this up), it is certainly a sign of something that this workhorse of a bar, the homely yet reliable Oh Henry!, has come to occupy the seat of my affection, and no less its permutations: the Peanut Butter Oh Henry!, the Honey Roasted Peanut Oh Henry!, and the seasonal Oh Henry! Egg. The Egg is not, as you might expect, an “egg” along the lines of the Cadbury Creme Egg, but just a roughly ovular mass of Oh Henry!. The resemblance is faint, but I suppose there is no holiday appropriate to the marketing of an Oh Henry! Lump of Turd (Valentine’s Day, maybe?), so Easter, and thus egg, it had to be. Luckily, like many seasonal confections and failed spinoffs, they are available year-round at your local Dollarama.
I first started enjoying, or at least first started buying, Oh Henry! bars when the corner store down the block from my parents’ house started selling the Peanut Butter Oh Henry! bars two-for-a-dollar. At that point, so keen on maximizing the money-to-candy ratio of my meagre allowance, I would have bought any two things for a dollar. But it was the PBOH, and consequently I developed a taste for them. This was the old Peanut Butter Oh Henry!, of course, circa probably ’93, long before the advent of the Reese Peanut Butter Oh Henry!, which I like less than the original. It’s minor, but what really gets me is that there is a very thin, but still perceptible, crisp layer of some sort, like the ossified membrane of a prehistoric fish (Probably not like that at all. Do membranes even ossify? Membranes don’t ossify, right?) around the peanut-butter inside that still throws me off. I’ve written before on the strangeness of a chocolate bar so long taken for granted being made eerily unfamiliar.2 The case of the PBOH’s Reesification is not quite the same, because I can pinpoint the difference, but sometimes those little differences can feel like some Invasion of the Body Snatchers/Capgras syndrome shit. The point is, I figure it was this cheap availability of PBOH that got me into the Oh Henry! in the first place. It does not fully explain my drift into fondness for the original Oh Henry!, but it at least brings us one step closer to solving this awesome mystery.
The Honey Roasted Peanut Oh Henry! (hereafter HRPOH) seemed like a bit of a gamble initially, and when I first tried it, I wasn’t totally convinced. The differences between it and a regular Oh Henry! are, admittedly, slight. The honey is almost undetectable, but I am willing to believe that the bar is sweeter, and the peanuts are slightly crisper, more delicate, as one would expect of honey-roasted peanuts. Only by this juxtaposition can you consciously appreciate that in a normal Oh Henry! the peanuts are, as it were, raw—almost vegetal—in comparison. It is a good bar. Though I have made an about-face in my opinion of the HRPOH, and sometimes crave it specifically in lieu of a regular Oh Henry!, I think it has also made me appreciate the original all the more; I’ve become more cognizant of its particular charms. There is something endearing about the oafishness of the original that is lacking in the inexplicably more refined HRPOH. It really depends on what kind of company one is in the mood for.
Anyway, the other day I was passing through downtown, grumbling, no doubt, about the lack of snow, and was seized by the desire for a chocolate bar. Speculating that it might brighten my mood somewhat, I stepped into one of those sad downtown depanneurs (I don’t know why I feel this way about deps in downtown Montreal. Perhaps I pity them for having to rely entirely on the patronage of people who live in downtown Montreal, at the same time that I resent as slightly evil their quite understandably obscene beer prices) and was surprised to find one Honey Roasted Peanut Oh Henry! sitting amongst the regular Oh Henry! bars. So, praising my good fortune (because I hadn’t had one in a while), I purchased it. Now, there are two things that make this story worth recounting:
1. There was a small note taped to the counter that read, “IS THIS THE END OF CAPITALISM?”
2. The chocolate bar was extremely stale. Not inedibly so, because I certainly ate it, but undeniably so.
There was something about these things taken together that brightened my mood so much more than I could have anticipated. There is the perverse satisfaction I sometimes derive from things going wrong, i.e., putting stock arbitrarily in a thing only to have it up and spit remorselessly in one’s face. Or perhaps it was because I do find something comforting in the tendre indifférence du monde, as it were, the idea of a universe in which “everything happens for a reason” being much more deeply terrifying and disheartening to me. The former leaves us freer to enjoy the delicate humour in life’s little failures, a humour that I find touches me almost like music, in that I can detect its touch, but can neither explain nor understand it. And here, by way of the cryptic note taped to the counter, there is the added mysterious consonance of so unexpected a sentiment of economic pessimism (or political optimism?), along with the experience of paying $1.69 for a stale, piece-of-shit chocolate bar. It’s basically Liszt, people.3
1 Which fudge somehow in the symbolic register of my family’s relationship to the outside world came to be thought of as the fudge equivalent of white bread—undeniably vulgar, yet exotic and desirable. As if one could with any credibility decry the nutritional content of one fudge compared to another—can the addition of marshmallows really cheapen something that is already entirely made out of sugar? Apparently, the answer was yes.
2 See “With Friends Like These...”
3 Or perhaps Ryuichi Sakamoto. I’m thinking someone with a lighter touch.