So, despite being a woefully fat bastard now, when I was growing up, I was painfully underweight and hated to eat. My parents begged, cajoled, bargained, and threatened, but no matter what they or anyone else did, I simply refused to eat. I’d hide food (mom got particularly pissed when she found a cache of fossilized chicken nuggets under the fridge), refuse to swallow it (I went for half of the road trip to Louisiana from TN with a goodly chunk of a Burger King chicken sandwich tucked into my cheek), or just throw it away (home got called by the school for that one–I pissed off mom again when she slyly asked how my “ham” sandwich was that day, when she’d given me a PB&J she knew I hadn’t touched).
No idea why, mind you, but that’s just how it was. Until one magical summer when I went to stay with my grandparents in Louisiana by myself for 6 weeks, just after wrapping up the 2nd grade.
Mawmaw and Pawpaw were of the “Don’t give a shit about your shit” generation of hardbitten deep-country Louisianans and didn’t have time to deal with a whiny kid who refused to eat. If I didn’t want supper, cool deal; go to your room and read your weird scifi novels, kid, and don’t complain to me later if your stomach’s growling, cuz I’m gonna be passed out drunk in my recliner “watching” the hunting channel from 8PM to 5AM.
Of course, as time went on, things got a little desperate, and I actually started to think about, you know, maybe eating some goddamned food before I died. Problem was that mawmaw only cooked “weird” Cajun food (if you’ve grown up being a picky non-eater, the aforementioned BK chicken sandwich is about the limits of your palate, so red beans and rice or crab gumbo’s just not gonna fly, starving or not). Things were looking grim; were I not here, now, typing this message, you might well surmise that I just died right then and there.
Luckily for me, pawpaw took mercy on the pasty nerd child his own pasty nerd son had somehow sired in direct contravention of family tradition (ours was to be a family of fishermen, drunks, and steelworkers until dad came around and fucked it up with his fancy college degree). I guess he’d gotten used to feeding a picky wimp after 18 years of raising my dad, so he knew just what to do: he loaded up his shrimp-goop-smeared, rust-pocked pickup with junk food from the corner store and snuck it to me after dinner.
Now, from a nutritional standpoint, it’s probably the case that I survived that summer on the back of calories and protein found in the main diet pawpaw provided (S’mores Poptarts for breakfast and cold hot dogs with mayonnaise on Bunny-brand white bread with Zapps “Cajun Crawtater”-flavored chips on the side for lunch and dinner), but thing is, I didn’t just survive, returned to my parents the same scrawny failure of a [Last Name Redacted] that I’d been when I got there.
No, no, I actually gained weight, rounding out my 6-week stint in that humid hellhole of a state at or surpassing my “correct” weight for age and height. And that was due to a single magical chunk of Heaven’s manna that pawpaw divined as my savior from the grubby racks of Son’s Grocery and Gas as he sauntered to the back to get that day’s case of Milwaukee. Somehow, pawpaw found my anti-food madness’s cure: Butterfingers.
Oh my fucking christ, I must have eaten a thousand Butterfingers that summer. Full size, snack size, King size, BBs, you name it, I’d eaten it! Bart Simpson’s torn-open face littered the floor of my small back room and tufts of yellow plastic waved from between the pages of each book I was in the middle of reading. I passed my days in the classic Butterfinger-aficionado’s stance: index finger planted firmly in mouth, digging the sickly-sweet gobs of munched-up toffee filling out of my back teeth. I was eating these things by the caseload, a sugar-fever mania gripping my malnourished brain and demanding only one thing to sate my newfound desire: more Butterfingers.
In the years since, I’ve put on a ton of weight by eating a ton of food–I even learned to love Cajun cuisine (tragically after my wonderful grandmother passed, and my damnable cousins filched her recipe box out of the inheritance)! But in the end, having had candy and chocolate from every corner of the earth and taking part in seasonal traditions like Cadbury Eggs and Reese’s pumpkins, one candy bar still has my heart, to its very core:
