PEGRITZ(.com)!

I was a Twenty-Something Candle Muncher!

September 21st, 2006

Yeah, I know it’s been a while since I rapped at you with my smoove, Cormac-McCarthy-meets-Bret-Easton-Ellis flow….Things have been a bit chaotic here in Pegritzland, what with the new semester upon me and sheaf after sheaf of student writings coming in to writhe beneath my savagely critical gaze. But here’s a little tale for you that’s been sitting around on my hard-drive for a while now. I’ve dusted off its bits and bytes, added a few details recently declassified by the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act, and generally polished it up to make it worthy of bearing the Pegritz(.com)! Stamp of Wicked Awesome Quality. So, without further ado…ladies and gentlemen, I give you a tale of thrills! chills! and complete idiocy. It’s….

I was a Twenty-Something Candle Muncher!

I do a lot of stupid things - usually for humor’s sake or to prove some sort of esoteric philosophico-ethical point that can only be illustrated by, say, leaping wearing a cowboy hat covered in J. R. “Bob” Dobbs buttons to a formal dinner. I do stupid things just for fun. Not Jackass-stupid, mind you. I’ve never done anything that really hurt, or in any way involved my scrotum. My idea of stupid is just…pointless and dumb. Case in point:

In the year One Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety Six, I was employed at The Book Store…which was actually a video store that also sold silly Americana bricabrac and assorted lame pseudocollectible trinkets. Franklin Mint collector’s plates and anime-eyed hummels and the like. I’ve many a tale concerning The Book Store and the hydrocephalic hillbilly cretins that frequented the place seeking New Releases to assuage their appetites for romantic, Sandra-Bullock-filled drivel or big bright explosions of the Action-Adventure variety…but those tales must await a future telling, for now I must expound the subject of my stupidity rather than theirs.

During the time I worked at The Book Store, I only got along well with one employee: a cute li’l blonde thang named Shelby. Shelby was completely and utterly awesome. She was quite easy on the eyes, let’s we say, but more importantly she was quite bright and was, therefore, an excellent coworker for me to hang with during the long hours of retail tedium. She and I could finish putting out all the new magazines on a Thursday morning ten times faster and ten times better than anyone else, and when it came to managing the video racks we were the acknowledged experts. Shelby had a great sense of humor, a wicked tongue raspy as a cat’s with sarcasm when needed…and a husband - which was really weird, because she was only eighteen and had, apparently, been already married for two or three years. To a backwards-ballcap-wearing dingleberry one year her senior who, when he would arrive to pick her up from work, would sit in his big ol’ rusty hooptie right in front of the store and stare daggers at my back as if I were pawing up his wifey right in front of him. Shelby found Hubbyboy’s antics just as hysterical as I did, and probably talked more shite on the poor loser than I ever did…which speaks volumes about the quality of their wedded bliss. Safe to say, though, that Shelby and I always had a great time working together…especially when we were closing the store.

Which brings us to the present narrative. It was a Tuesday night toward the end of May, and Shelby and I were closing as usual. The Book Store officially closed at 10pm on weeknights, but we prettymuch started shutting up the shop at a quarter ’til when we turned off the video monitors in the corners, shut off most of the lights, did the final video returns, and then spent the last fifteen minutes sitting around on the checkout counter waiting for the Official Time Clock to strike the 10 Spot so we could cash out the registers and head home. Hubbyboy was sitting out front as usual, his smoldering gaze lying upon my shoulders like an irritating sunburn, and of course Shelby and I were fake-flirting like mad just to piss his dumb ass off some more. I, however, was somewhat distracted by something other than the usual gravity of her lovely bosom: the luscious scent of the box of 100 Honeydew-Melon-scented Yankee Candle Company votives sitting in a box next to my register.

Shelby’s melons were pretty damn mind-devouring to a twentysomething single male such as myself, but nowhere near as hypnotic as the scent of honeydew melon that drifted up like a pale green breath of cool, latesummer freshness to my nostrils. Honeydew melon! One of my alltime favorite scents! The candles were a lovely pale green that matched their odor perfectly, and since I’d put the fresh new box of them out that afternoon I’d been completely entranced, my skull light and thoughtless, filled with their etheric scent, my eyes soothed and seduced by their delicate, faerie-wing greenness….Every five minutes, I’d pick up one of the candles and run it beneath my nose like a crack addict snorting up the precious fumes of his fix, filling my nostrils with dizzying, opiate honeydew bliss. Shelby found my melon-candle addiction particularly hilarious, and, yes, I tried to hide my habit from her view but there was no hiding such a special, special love from the world. I wanted to marry one of those Yankee votive candles and live forever in dewy ecstacy with my waxy bride. I wanted to stuff my pockets with those candles and fill my car’s glovebox with them, so I could be surrounded day in and day out with their lovely stink.

Worst of all, I wanted to eat one.

“Shelby,” said I at some point, only half-joking, “I could just take a bite out of this candle right friggin’ now because…because…something that smells so good just cannot possibly taste bad!”

“Oh, really?” Shelby answered (probably by this point ready to just take one of the goddamned candles and jam it down my throat to shut me up about them). “Well…I’ll buy you one of them - but only if I get to watch you eat it.”

Mind you, the candles were only a buck a piece…and, yes, I’d certainly thought about buying one and surrpetitiously giving it a long, sensual lick or maybe a delicate little nibble just to assuage my own idiotic curiosity because I really couldn’t imagine something that smelled so delicious could possibly not taste the same. But sensibility always won out and I restrained myself to just sniffing. But now that Shelby offered to buy me one of the grounds that I eat it before her…well, hell! Not only could I finally answer the question of the candle’s taste for myself, but I could do it before a cute girl and thereby prove my ineffable manliness. Fucking Hubbyboy out front wouldn’t dare eat a candle to impress a chick, but PEGRITZ SURE AS HELL WOULD!

I thought about it for a second, then replied: “Allright. You’re on.”

Shelby gave me a dollar and I rang up the candle on my register. Then, as she watched, I slowly peeled the wrapper off the candle as though I were undressing Shelby herself - a minor fantasy that I’d entertained now and again, of course - letting the unfettered honeydew airs rise from the candle. I looked upon the naked candle with a sudden spike of trepidation, which I kept carefully hidden for fear of impugning my stonecold idiotic image - but…it had been ages since I’d eaten a candle, something I actually had done before. When I was SEVEN. I vaguely remembered chewing up the tasteless wax and I wondered…might this candle be as tasteless? NO! It couldn’t be! I mean…it smelled so GOOD, it had to taste the same. Right?

Shelby was watching me, nodding, saying, “C’mon…eat it already. You know you want to!”

Well, what else could I do now?

So, holding the candle sideways, I sank my teeth into its melon-colored flesh and bit a huge chunk out of it.

I chewed slowly, feeling the wax crumble between my teeth, a strange, subtle chemical flavor slowly diffusing across my tongue….

Shelby saw the light fade from my eyes as I slowly ground up that waxen cud between my teeth. “Well…how does it taste?” she asked.

“Uhhh….Waxy?”

“So does it taste as good as it smells?”

It actually kind of tasted like a mouthful of unflavored salt-water taggy spiced with a few drops of dishwashing liquid. Somehow, all along I knew it would taste just like a gobful of phlegm, but hey….Duty had called. And now I answered truthfully: “Not really.”

“You know, I paid good money for that candle,” Shelby said. “I expect you to finish it.”

“Finish it?!”

“Yeah. You need to whole damned candle now. I don’t want it now that you took a big nasty bite out of it.”

“….Sure,” I sighed. I mean, I had to conclude my part of the bargain now. Shelby had spent a good dollar that she could’ve used to buy herself a Coke or a bottle of Lipton’s Apple-Spice tea to buy me a stupid candle to eat. Plus, a really attractive young lady was demanding, with her luscious blue eyes, that I - oh, what else could I do?

I ate the candle. I ate the entire fucking thing.

I chewed and chewed that wax and gulped it down in gritty lumps, each synthetic bolus of candlemeat sliding down my throat like the derision and laughter of the gods themselves. The tantalizing - but false, alas, sooooo false - scent of honeydew melon continued to float up through my sinuses even as the completely non-melodic, non-melonic taste of snot and Palmolive tortured my tongue and made my uvula writhe with every swallow. Thankfully, my stomach didn’t seem to mind being insulted by a few ounces of wax, for it didn’t hurt or otherwise object as I’d thought it would. In fact, it actually killed the gnawing hunger that had been troubling me since lunch that day.

When I was done, all I had left was the wick dangling from my fingertips.

“You’ve gotta eat that, too,” Shelby said.

“Ok, no. Uh-uh. No fucking way.” I don’t really know why but…after having gulped down so much wax, I knew that if I curled up that little two-inch-long piece of string and swallowed it, that would set off a volcanic eruption of spew. Shelby kept trying to get me to eat the wick but I patently refused and threw it into the wastebasket. Fortunately, by that point, it was officially 10 o’clock, and we could shut down everything and go home. I had officially proved to Shelby that I was a Real Man, not a highschool-aged, ballcap-wearing toyboy - I could choke down an entire votive candle like a MANLY MAN! Of course, that must prove that my wang was at least fifteen inches long and my complementary skills as a lover unmatched by any mere mortal!

Yeah. I’m sure that’s exactly what Shelby thought when I ate that stupid candle. By that point, I was just feeling like being a total blockhead. A veritable nimrod. It was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. And for what? To impress a girl? Ultimately…not really. Shelby was just a friend - a coworker whom I thought was cute, but that was it: I never had any real interest in her. To prove something to myself? No. I already knew I was a dumbass with a penchant for such strange stunts.

To this day I don’t really know why, precisely, I devoured that poor candle. Some stories don’t have happy endings - or sad endings…or even any kind of endings. Much like a Samuel Beckett play rewritten by a ten-year-old, the Culinary Investigation of the Yankee Candle has no real conclusion. No real resolution. It was dreamt up, it happened, and was promptly forgotten by all but me immediately afterward amid the same overarching air of Complete Mystery. Perhaps the Templars know why I did it…or the Gnostics. But I sure don’t!

EPILOGUE:

Sensitive readers be varned! The following material contains references that many many find…well, feculent. Procede at thine own risk!

So…now you may be wondering what the aftereffects, shall we say, of the candle-eating were. Everyone always asks that. Well, let me tell you so you’ll finally stop pestering me.

Two or three days later, the wax emerged as per the usual course of nature. And though the process wasn’t particularly difficult, I still found myself afterward entertaining a peculiar sense of relief, never known to me before, as though I’d finally put the entire ridiculous incident behind me, as it were. I’d finally expunged that moment of frippery from my life. But then…

rising from below…

came the pure, unsullied scent of honeydew melons.