Conference Center Candy
In New Orleans, the muggish damp is everywhere—even in the Pere Marquette Hotel business center. Here, sat at a black-clothed table, there is a tiny dish of hard candies.
The wrapper, white and blue with pineapple print, is crinkly. An age-old question: is it better to interrupt the presenter with a quick, violent unwrapping, a loud and unmistakeable interruption? Or should one peel bit by bit, painstaking and slow, hoping to escape notice?
The speaker is well-amplified, and I am in the back of the hall. Quick and violent it is.
The folds of plastic conceal a golden lozenge. It is milky yellow, almost white, like a pineapple core stewed until translucent. It emits a gentle fragrance. If not for the small size, it could easily be soap.
The lozenge is sticky to the finger, its outer millimeter turned soft and grippy in the wet air. The shape of it is a balance of masculine and feminine: an oval surrounded by a sharp-edged bumper, mold-pressed, protecting it from the world. The belted body is round, but the top and bottom are flat, as if to ensure stackability—a quality thwarted by its sacklike packaging.
A pause in the presentation. I pop it in my mouth.
I feel the crawling acid of pineapple nectar, that chemical that eats you back. Citric acid right up front, thin and bright. The pucker tapers quickly, then withholds. This love-bombing is textbook avoidant behavior. It tempts me not to lick and suck, but to destroy.
The long flats thin out, dissolving slowly, nearly ready to shatter just as my impatience reaches a peak. But then my probing tongue discovers the bottom has already fallen out. The far side failed first. Further lapping finds the inner core revealed, chewy, almost creamy.
A bite destroys the candy. Three sugar textures tangle together, syrupy saliva swishing around the chewy core and its shattered shell. All withheld power capitulates, the remainder of its flavors all simultaneously releasing in an orgiastic peak. This is the moment against which the slow-suck fuse was calibrated.
In seconds, it’s gone. In its wake, a mild floral heat. Following that, a sore tongue. Was it the sugar that burned me? The pineapple? Or did I hurt myself in the anticipatory pressure and climax?
Lapping away this dull, lingering burn, I take the mic. A roundtable has begun.
“Hello,” I say. “I’m Albert. I’ve worked here for over a year.”
