Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America Read Online Free PDF Page A

the holiday calendar, and specifically by Halloween, which as we all know, can be traced back to All Hallows’ Eve, an ancient religious rite in which priests raced around the streets of Dublin throwing snack-size Snickers bars at impoverished children.
    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