The Candyman

I was raised in the 90s, your typical suburban family in West Warwick, Rhode Island. As a kid, I kept busy with sailing, soccer, role-playing games, and Magic: The Gathering. I also wore glasses and often neglected trimming my nails and brushing my hair. As you can imagine, these habits invited mockery from my classmates. The highlight of my days, after spending hours at school facing the derision of my classmates, was to make it home in time to catch Pokemon on the WB. It wasn’t just my hobbies that garnered ridicule from my peers, I am also cursed with intelligence, so much so the principal once refused to suspend me because there was a state test that week and the school “needed my scores”. After spending nearly all of elementary school being taunted and teased for my hobbies and unusual intelligence, it was time to get even. In middle school, I decided to start fighting back against these bullies the best way I knew how…

Enter: Capitalism

I sized up my tormentors, I saw their hunger, I saw their greed, I saw the overstuffed pockets of their undereducated baby-boomer parents who made a comfortable life off entry-level jobs and gave their special little snowflake everything he wanted. I became a budding entrepreneur of the diabetes-industry and opened a candy business out of my backpack! I didn’t need it to tote school books because I’d either already read them or I’d done the homework while the teacher laboured over the pronunciation of monosyllabic four-letter words. The going was tough at first, when funds were tight. I lost a lot of money and product to the preteen highwayman at the back of the bus. I arrived home with the uncomfortable stickiness that oft accompanies the torment of bullies more than a few times, my own product was being used against me.

But things would turn around, not all the tough guys wanted to commandeer their confections by force. One of these self-styled jocks was more than amiable to an arrangement where he didn’t need to do any roughing up or cajoling in return for his sugar fix. I came to him with an offer: I’d supply him with candy and he’d ensure my stores and coin purse remained un-pilfered. As it often goes with pre-teens, his hunger for candy grew with his size and eventually the arrangement required a little modification. Within a few months he was no longer just protection, he’d become my first salesman.

Over the course of the next six months, my business grew: I took on a partner, bought my dad a membership to SAM’S club, and built my first franchise. And by franchise, I mean the mobile candy shop on a radio-flyer wagon to ensure my revenue stream continued through the summer! Business was great!

After a little over a year, I was bringing in about $15 a day in profits selling warheads, airheads, lemonheads, and other non-head-related candies. We rarely sold chocolate due to its propensity for melting in the heat of a backpack (a lesson my first Jansport bag won’t soon forget). There were minor hangups – occasionally we had to replace a salesman who was skimming a little too much sugar off the top, but things were good, until a few nosey adults got involved.

One afternoon my father received a call from the school principal, a man with whom he was already on a first-name basis. Do you know what your son’s been up to? the principal cawed. My father, bless his heart, was no stranger to these kinds of accusations. He had long since realized it was a smarter move to take the side of his own fuck-trophy than that of some piddling middle-manager. He calmly invited the principal to enlighten him.

He was treated to a tale of the sweet entrepreneurial dealings of his first-born son. I can only imagine how he swelled with pride hearing about my lucrative business model. I distributed my product to salesmen in the shady corners of the back of the bus, free of charge, only a promise they’d pay me for it in the future. I was creating addicts, the principal claimed, and kids were spending their lunch money on my product rather than the mysterious flavors of school-made sloppy joes. They were so hopped up on Pixy Stix and Caramel Apple Blow-Pops the teachers were having difficulty maintaining order in the classrooms. I had to be stopped, I was cutting into the catering company’s profits, I didn’t have a business license..

My dad laughed at him, and, with the cool sangfroid of a man used to the antics of his adolescent son, asked: Has be been doing this during class? Has anyone seen him selling candy? Have these candy sales been interfering with other students’ ability to learn? No, the principal replied grimly, he’d only heard it was me running this business after my salesmen had been caught dealing during class. I noted then to check into the snitches in my organization. It was time these snitches got their just desserts…

After receiving no backup in the sugar skirmish from my father, a battle raged, Principal vs. Peppermint Peddler. Thankfully, one’s tenure in middle school is short, and my father saw it wise to ensure my next school was somewhere where I wouldn’t have the same access to a distribution network. Because at the public school where I should have gone, there is no doubt in either his or my mind, that I would have eventually used this network to peddle a much more profitable product. That’s the story of how I ended up in Catholic School.