I might have started to fret. On a different day I would have, for I smoked between sixty and eighty Quills a day, and even if I cut down to fifty a day, I’d be out of cigarettes with three days left before my father’s return. I was feeling almost charmed, though. In reaching his voicemail I’d dodged a blow, and then I’d dodged a second one not leaving a message, and that’s to say nothing of the phone itself—not even a scratch. So rather than fretting, I took it on the chin. I had at least a few days to come up with a way to get my hands on more smokes, and, after all, it was usually better not to press.
I fixed a pot of coffee and read some short stories (Barthelme’s “Balloon,” Kafka’s “Blumfeld,” Parker’s “Our Cause”), dined on cheese and crackers standing at the counter, sliced an apple for dessert, then, apart from ten minutes spent playing with Blank, wrote straight through to bedtime, forgetting the money. What I wrote was the very beginning of this book, right up to the part where Jonboat suggests that we sleep on the hyphen. It didn’t occur to me I’d started a book, though. Having never much really enjoyed reading memoirs, I hadn’t ever wanted (at least not since childhood), let alone attempted (well, perhaps once, sort of), to write one before. Still, I’d had fun.
It was not a bad birthday. I fell asleep easy.
When I woke the next morning, I knew what to do.
* * *
I’d bought Quills by the carton from Pang at White Hen for almost ten years, and for ten years before that I’d bought them by the pack there. Pang didn’t like me. I don’t mean he disliked me. To Pang I was no one, as I am to most people. As most people are to most people, me included. That’s how I thought of it. Come to think of it now, though, Pang may have disliked me. After all, it’s one thing to be no one to a stranger, but I’d engaged Pang in face-to-face commerce at least once a week for nearly two decades and he’d never said even so much as, “I’m Pang,” to me. I didn’t even know if he was owner or manager. The badge he wore pinned to his shirt didn’t say. Maybe I disliked him. In any case, I figured I’d spent enough of my money in his mart to merit two cartons’ worth of credit for a week, so I took a walk over there and made my case.
“Why no credit card?” he said.
“Sometimes,” I said, “I get those offers in the mail, but I never saw a need—”
“No,” he told me. “I did not really ask.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You are not creditworthy. Or else you’d have a credit card. Come back with money and then I’ll sell to you.”
“Pang,” I said, “I see you all the time. If our positions were switched, I wouldn’t even hesitate to give you what I’m asking for.”
“Maybe that is why you are not creditworthy.”
I nearly had hold of a pretty good rejoinder having to do with how the quality of our banter was evidence of a familiarity between us sufficient to permit an extension of credit in either direction (Pang to me, or I to Pang); how the curtness of Pang’s refusal of my credit was itself reason for Pang to grant me credit; how his freewheeling bluntness, if nothing else, argued that he felt no anxiety at all about possibly insulting me by saying the wrong thing, which was another way to say that he was comfortable with me, and which probably showed, if he’d only take a moment to look a little more deeply, that he knew in his heart I deserved his trust. But the rejoinder eluded me. I couldn’t quite get my mouth around it. Yet something needed saying. I’d stood there too long.
I said, “Are you the owner?”
“You want to threaten to tell someone I don’t give away Quills? Go yell it on a mountain. Go find out who cares. Corporate, you think? Call them. Call corporate. Corporate, this guy. I think you are banned from the premises, now.”
“All I was saying was your badge just says Pang. It doesn’t say owner or manager on it, and I’ve always wondered.”
“Oh yeah?” Pang said. “And what do you think?”
“You sound like an owner.”
“Okay,” Pang said. “Sure. Okay. A misunderstanding. Have a Dubble Bubble on the house, on me.” He pushed a wrapped log of old gum across the counter. “You are once again welcome to shop here with money. Or become creditworthy, and bring MasterCard, Visa, or American Express. No Discover.”
* * *
By the time I’d chewed it soft enough to blow a good bubble, there wasn’t any sweetness left in the gum. Probably that was metaphorical for something. I didn’t know what. Or how to figure out what. As I sat on our stoop smoking Quill 151, though, I felt myself verging on insights.
Gum, I was thinking, was an old-timey product, and I supposed that in its early days, back when the practice of professional dentistry entailed little more than extracting black teeth from rotted-out jaws, it was understood simply to be a soft candy thats job was to continually sweeten your mouth for longer intervals of chewing than other soft candies such as caramel or taffy. This old-timey gum was not, I supposed, nearly as elastic as the gum of today. And I supposed the elasticity a piece of it possessed would be greatly depleted, if not entirely lost, as soon as you’d chewed all its sweetness away; that once it went bland, it rapidly stiffened, and if you kept chewing you’d weaken its integrity until it came apart in rigid, stringy bits that caught in the creases of your throat when you swallowed.
But then, I supposed, Dubble Bubble was invented, and what made it different wasn’t its flavor (which was just as basically sweet and short-lived as the flavor of any other brand of gum), but its extra chewability: it started more elastic than the other brands of gum, and maintained its elasticity for dozens of minutes beyond the loss of its sweetness. You could keep on chewing for a really long time.
So what, though? Why should you? Why continue chewing? If the sweetness was gone, what incentive did you have?
Those, I imagined, must have been the questions the chemist behind Dubble Bubble was asking when he finally reached his breaking point. All he’d ever wanted was to make a sweeter gum, and, after years of trying, he’d found it impossible—sugar acted like sugar, be it cane-, sap-, corn-, or beet-derived. Sweetness was fleeting, and the rate at which it fled could not be decreased, at least not by any means he’d been able to contrive. And so he gave up. After what I supposed to be years of trying—after selling his pharmacy to buy more time to research “the recipe” and losing his wife to the flu or maybe cholera and witnessing his children in their burlap clothing developing rashes and patches of baldness while failing to thrive as they played with worms and twigs in the dirt—the poor chemist, defeated, sleep-deprived and febrile, collapsed at his table in a puddle of sweat, face inches from a panful of proto–Dubble Bubble, only to be woken by a series of pleasing-sounding snaps and whooshes paired with exclamations like “Mine was really big!” and “Not as big as mine was!” made by his sons who he saw, through bleary eyes, bearing pink, expanding globes on their puckering lips.