![]() Suddenly, the candy was no longer a crumbling sandcastle. This is what I’ve been missing?Īs I bit into the second square, I held it upside down, by chance, and that actually turned out to be a beautiful accident. The candy bar felt like caulking glue inside my mouth, the overhyped peanut butter substance overpowering all of the other factory-processed ingredients-nougat, peanuts, and caramel. It was dry, like the worst case of cottonmouth. ![]() He nodded and offered me a brown paper bag for the candy, like I were toting a tall boy back to work.īack at my desk, I peeled open the wrapper and took a bite. When I finally made my selection-a decision only slightly less difficult and life-defining than settling on a Netflix movie or a tattoo-even the store clerk understood something momentous was happening. But in the last few weeks, I have found myself lingering by my bodega’s counter-landscape of chocolates bars and gummy snacks, an array that seems to have remained virtually unchanged. In the intervening years, I have remained almost entirely loyal to that winter-break pledge, while constructing a Catholic-inspired diet and lifestyle, built on guilt and the stifling of desires. From then on, I would vow to protect my molars. The front-left had chipped along its bottom surface, when some neck-muscled MMA type decided to put me in a chokehold at a punk-rock show, and I decided that only pussies tap out. The front-right tooth had exploded in thirds, when a baseball met my face at full speed. My two front teeth had already suffered serious traumas. Only 75 years his junior, I suddenly understood what Hiram meant. But it’s not your johnson, it’s your teeth, especially your two front teeth.” You probably think your greatest possession is your johnson. In Donald Antrim’s, The Hundred Brothers, 93-year-old Hiram, the oldest of the brothers, schools a younger sibling, “Your teeth are your greatest possession. And my make-out sessions, including one with the woman who would one day become my wife, were (miraculously) STD-free. Drunken blackouts were never followed by hangovers. And my first semester was a good one, virtually without consequence, as my body displayed some sort of superhero’s metabolism for life, as I gauged my newfound freedoms. It’s not unusual for college freshmen to test their limits: to drink beyond coherence, to eat late night grease bombs, to fuck without meaning. Either that, or I needed to stop brushing with Fun Dip. But perhaps I had underestimated the decaying effect a daily packet of Tropical Skittles was having on my enamel. It wasn’t that I didn’t brush-I did, morning and night. He was trying to save my pearly yellowish-whites. I had cavities in an unsettling large percentage of my teeth-nine in total-and my jaw was sore from staring at the good doctor’s perfectly patterned hair plugs, as he propped open my mouth with some sort of rubber gag piece. At the age of 18, the decision arrived on the heels of a visit to my childhood dentist, during the winter break of my freshman year of college. It had been more than a decade since I stopped eating candy.
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