Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Big Jim, Taffy, The Wiz and Me
I didn’t mean to write an essay but a theme got presented to me - The Wizard of Oz - and damned if I didn’t fire one off just like cuttlefish ink. And now you get to read it. My sincerest apologies, unless I don’t like you, in which case, you had it coming. A blessing on your houses, and a warm compliment on your garages.
Jim was pretty much the most favoritest guy in the whole neighborhood. He was a scowling, lantern-jawed 40- or 50-year-old, and he drove the big white ice cream truck. Jim’s ice cream truck was not the only one to ply our quiet streets, and we’d chase after them all with fistfuls of sweaty change - but Jim’s truck had the biggest selection, the nicest counter-window, the sweetest jangling music, the most different kinds of everything… and he’d let you take your time choosing, as if you hadn’t just waited in line for 10 minutes with every chance in the world to decide what you wanted, but still you found yourself standing at his counter recapitulating the classic “cremesicle - wacky packs” quandry for yourself yet again, and everyone behind you was laughing in the hot sun in the middle of the street, impatient but happy, and still, Jim wouldn’t rush you. He’d just stare down at you, wordless, almost sneering, arms crossed and faded tricep tattoo stretched to unintelligibility, waiting for you to decide what kind of sugar to buy from him. When we’d hear the chimes of his old van coming around, nothing else mattered to any of us but getting outside to see him. Even if we couldn’t at that moment afford to buy his candy, we’d just want to be there and soak up the atmosphere. Jim was, for us, in our small world, The Man, and we loved him for it.
Such small greatnesses filled my world when I was young - the greatness of the ice cream truck and of Saturday morning cartoons and of shopping for school supplies. The annual events were particularly noteworthy, in fact, because they arose so rarely and therefore had to be experienced to the fullest extent possible when they did come to pass - major yearly landmarks like the school-supply shopping trip, seeing the fireworks on the Fourth of July, and the annual showing of the Wizard of Oz.
The Wizard of Oz was this really old movie - older than my mom or my dad, both of whom had seen it as children which conclusively proved that this movie was from somewhere prior to the beginning of time. It started, as old things always did, in black-and-white, but then it burst out into color after a catastrophic - well, I don’t want to ruin it for you, but let’s just say Dorothy wasn’t in Kansas any longer and this movie wasn’t like regular movies, either. It had a witch who was genuinely powerful and frightening, with a cadre of flying monkeys at her command; there were freaks and manimals and all manner of disturbing entities prancing around, seeking an omnipotent wizard who lived in an antisceptically utopian city surrounded by fields of drug-laced flowers.... a golden road led them forward through fearsome perils to a series of confrontations that challenged each of them at the essential core of their psyches .... and finally: iconoclasm, triumph, reassurance, return, re-monochromatism, credits, and one more year before we’d see it again. What a great event.
The Wizard of Oz, in those days of tripartite television control, was shown once a year, and was not otherwise available for viewing (by me, anyway). There were no VCRs, and the idea of a DVR would have rendered any householder incredulous. You saw it when they showed it, or you waited till next year. When the Wizard came on, I’d be allowed to stay up late to watch the whole thing, a process which took on a certain ceremonial air. As I recall, I demanded a tee-vee dinner for this event - I specifically preferred a Libby’s brand with embossed characters at the bottom of every section of the divided foil tray. I appropriated the entirety of the couch in front of the television, and forced everybody else in the family to find seating elsewhere. But perhaps most importantly, I ate taffy.
There are two kinds of taffy: the chewy nuggets, individually wrapped in twists of wax paper and sold out of nostalgically-unsanitary barrels on boardwalks, and the other kind. The other kind is a thin, flat sheet, mostly off-white with a colored stripe across the center. It was wrapped in wax paper like regular taffy, but this paper is sealed shut and has big red letters printed imposingly all over it. If you put it in the freezer the paper peeled off fairly easily, and bits of taffy snap right off. These shatter when eaten, reforming in your mouth into a bolus of sugary goodness. It doesn’t seem to come so much in flavors, as colors - purple, not grape; red, not cherry.... It was a fairly straightforward glucose delivery system, so effective that I was only allowed to buy sheet taffy from Jim once a year - on Wizard of Oz night.
Jim seemed to know his place in this process - though his schedule was notoriously variable, he always seemed to come around on Wizard Saturday. I’d line up at his truck, every cell in my little body shivering with excitement as I handed over my small change and got back, without reply or commentary, my taffysheet. I’d trot it back indoors and pop it in the freezer, waiting in a pre-candy fugue state for the movie to start. I would postpone my supper till the opening credits, peeling back the foil from my scarlet pasta or breaded chicken lumps as the MGM lion roared, and then tucking in vociferously during the initial scenes. Dialogue was obscured by the scrape of my fork on the foil, but all I was missing was predicate, the set-up, the obligatory exposition we’d need before....
Dot’s storm-tossed house lands with a bump; she tentatively pushes open the front door. Outside, for the first time in the movie, color blazes from the screen, shimmering gold and verdant green. Eyes that had grown used to using only the rods suddenly found the cones fully engaged; a brain that had forgotten that it was filling in the color to a colorless image found its work now redundant, leading to a super-saturated awareness of color so intense as almost to be a texture as much as a hue. It was a mindbending cinematic moment, one I specifically anticipated for a year at a time - and it was at that moment that I, traditionally, peeled the paper off my wafer of taffy and started working my way through it.
As the Lollypop Guild capered and crooned, I felt the surge in my taffy-loving soul. Dorothy skipped off down the road and my heart palpitated with the sugar rush. She’d meet her various friends and I’d finish my treat and sit in a stupor, overenergized and utterly focused on the 19-inch screen and blissfully insensible to the nauseating combination of foods I’d just consumed. I’d had my teevee supper, my precious Jim-bought taffy, and now there were monkeys flying out of my television. It was scary, but not too scary; I knew things were going to turn out okay in the end. But for the moment, I could just sit there, alone on the couch, cradling my elbows under the big brown afghan, sugar-addled and riveted by technicolor. It was a double whammy of an event, two once-a-years in concert. I had a solemn obligation to get as much out of it as humanly possible, and I always took such obligations seriously.
Times have, to say the least, changed. Television just isn’t an event anymore; I almost never get to see a movie in a theater at all. But sometimes I still pick up a sheet of that taffy from a toy store near my office; it’s not the same as buying it from Jim’s truck but it is still fun to eat. And I am looking forward very much to seeing the Wizard of Oz someday soon with my young son for the very first time. He knows that we can watch whatever we want on television, whenever we want to, but I think it will still be meaningful to him to watch it straight through with me and know that’s how I saw it when I was his age, how Opa saw it when he had been a little boy. And if I need to keep anybody’s attention, I might hold a sheet or two of taffy in reserve till that first scene in color. It seems like a classic combination, and I am a great respecter of the classics.
