In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [63]
It was under this sign that Pulaski dispensed Juju Babies, licorice cigars, Mary Janes, Jawbreakers, Navy Cut Chewing Tobacco, Mule Twist, Apple Plug, Eight-Hour Day Rough Cut, Mail Pouch, Copenhagen Snuff, and summer sausage, sliced thin.
Penny Candy is just about the very first purchase that any kid actually makes himself. That very first buy which launches all of us on a lifelong career as Consumers, leading finally to God knows where. Kids take to buying the way fleas take to Beagle hounds. It’s just natural. You don’t have to learn; somehow you know.
It doesn’t take long for Penny Candy buyers to begin that great weeding-out process of the Slobs versus the Anti-Slobs. It is here that it starts. A discriminating Penny Candy connoisseur knew what he was after, while the rest merely settled for anything that was big, lumpy, sticky, and sweet. The Juju Baby connoisseur today buys Porsches and fine wines while his slack-jawed erstwhile friend continues to dig large, lumpy, sticky-sweet automobiles and syrupy beer that comes in six-packs with self-open tops. I pride myself, perhaps overly so, on having developed an exceedingly discriminating palate for the various vintages and châteaux of Penny Candy.
The genuine American Penny Candy store bears no relationship to the present chi-chi Ladies’ Magazine reproductions that are popping up in Greenwich Village, the hipper sections of San Francisco, and Old Town in Chicago. They were invariably dark, with windows filled with cardboard placards advertising Dutch Cleanser, Kayo the magic chocolate drink, Campbell’s Pork & Beans, and the Hohman PTA Penny Supper.
The candy itself was displayed in a high, oak-framed case with a curved glass front and sliding glass doors well out of reach of the sneakier purchasers. In the case were rows of metal trays containing The Stuff.
Penny Candy was bought in lots of from two to four cents, and in extreme emergencies one penny, but that was rare. Pulaski, bending high over the case, would peer down at us, looking unconcerned and bored while we made our decisions.
“Fer Chrissake, I haven’t got all day! D’y want a licorice pipe or not!?”
And the battle was on. Glaring down at the huddled band of well-heeled investors, many of whom were in well-advanced stages of the Sour Ball Shakes, Pulaski played his cards coolly and well. He knew that he had all the trump as well as the only neighborhood supply of licorice whips and wax false teeth. He was the Man; the Connection. It was a Seller’s market.
The wax false teeth, by the way, played a part in a great second-grade drama when suddenly and without warning wax false teeth became a maniacal fad that swept over Harding School like a tidal wave. I remember one historic afternoon when every last male member of my second-grade class showed up with a large set of wax false dentures clamped in his jaw to face Miss Shields and Arithmetic. Little did we realize at the time that the wax false teeth were a foreshadow of things to come for many in that benighted academy of lower learning.
Miss Shields stood for a long electric moment beside her desk and then silently reached out her claw, palm upward, and said simply:
“Give ’em to me.”
One by one she de-toothed us, putting the booty in her lower left-hand drawer along with sixty-seven rubber daggers, 922 competition yoyos, seventeen small well-thumbed, smudgy volumes of comic books relating clandestine adventures of Maggie & Jiggs, thirty-six bird whistles, a round dozen Throw-UR-Voice ventriloquist gadgets purchased by mail from Johnson & Smith, two wax mice on a string, and a giant arsenal of water pistols, cap guns, and carbide cannons. Miss Shields had seen a lot, and wax false teeth were just another wave in a giant sea of surrealistic nuttiness that she had fought all of her life.
“Give ’em to me.”
And we gave.
Another specialty of wax that had a certain illicit air about it was a small wax bottle filled with a colored, sickeningly sweet