Dollar Gummies
And other materials.
Thanks for reading Big Reader Bad Grades! For the rest of July and August I’m piling up editing arrangements: if you’d like comprehensive line edits and feedback on your fiction or non-fiction, send me a DM! Base rates are $100 for pieces up to 2,500 words, $150 up to 5,000 words, and we can negotiate a simple rate for any projects beyond that size.
1.
It’s been almost a week since quitting my grocery store job. I sent out a newsletter the day it happened and then Mo_Diggs rang me from a landline to say this was very good news and congrats and also that there was nobody at his office and could I please keep him company while he pretends to work.1
I was at Target as we talked and I was anxious about the fact that I’m not great company on the phone. Talk too much or too little. He was chewing something what sounded like candy and it made me want candy so I went browsing and saw that they carried a forest-themed bag of gummy bears that I’d only had once before, on a train, where a vendor came rolling a cart down the aisle and I showed her the menu card and asked if I was seeing correctly that they were selling an eight-dollar bag of gummy bears. She told me yes and explained that the gummy bears were “organic” and that they came in “eight different flavors” and that they “are so so good.”
I bought them.
She took my money and reached into her cart and handed me a condom and I said “Just the gummies will be fine” but she was gone already and so I looked again and saw that it was not a condom but a packet of gummy bears. They were organic, yes, and they came in eight different flavors, true, but more importantly the bag contained one of each flavor, meaning I paid one dollar per gummy bear as though a dentist were president. Normally I would eat them by the palmful but because of the cost I ate these gummy bears individually like a Parisian.
They were the best I’d ever tasted and I was angry as I chewed them.
2.
The porn star and sex guru Robin Byrd hosted an eponymous late night show on Channel J, in Manhattan. It ran for 20 years. It was sex-positive and playful and messy like Wayne’s World but everyone was naked. She wore a black crochet bikini every night. She did her makeup on-camera in the show’s opening minutes. She’d invite sex workers and models to come on the show and together they’d chat or have sex or take calls from viewers. In one episode we see Byrd crawling on hands and knees through a throng of half-naked dancers. She reaches up and pulls out someone’s penis and puts it in her eye. It is a lot more charming than it sounds.
Robin Byrd is 69 years old now. She lives in a rent-controlled apartment with her 85-year-old husband Shelly. They were married in 1983. Worked on the show together for its entire 20-year run.
They see the show as a shared legacy.
But Shelly has dementia now. Their living room walls are lined with shelves and the shelves are piled with 3/4 U-Matic tapes and the tapes are covered in sheets of plastic tarp.
This is the only existing archive of her show’s 600-episode run.
There’s a new documentary on HBO about an archive offering to digitize and preserve those episodes.
The exchange is basically this: We immortalize the footage, but we keep the tapes.
3.
These days at 2 p.m. I get some vague internal stress signal like that blinking green light in Gatsby and I think it’s because that’s normally when I’d be putting on my uniform and heading to work. When thinking about work on Friday afternoon I remembered how often people couldn’t find what they were looking for in the DRY FRUIT/NUTS aisle and how they’d flag an employee saying, “SIR DO YOU WORK HERE? SIR WHERE IS THE NUTMEAT? PISTACHIO NUTMEAT? I’M LOOKING FOR UNSALTED PISTACHIO NUTMEAT AND CANNOT FIND IT.”
Sometimes if you help a person find something too quickly they’ll get offended. Like if they say they’ve been looking for something the past several minutes and they’re flustered and then you grab it off the shelf right over their shoulder, they’re likely to slap it into their cart saying, “Alright well fuck me I guess I’m blind, right?”
Many people will gladly accept help from managers or policemen or Jesus when searching for things because the presence of an authority figure makes them feel like the situation is dire, that their confusion or helplessness is a result of some broken norm, a failure in the system.
One might reason that if there is any single problem in your life that gets promptly resolved by the fluorescently-shirted Alex in the peanut aisle, then there’s a good chance the problem is you.
I don’t agree with that but I see that it’s a complex out there in the world and you just have to work with it.
4.
Byrd and her husband call the tapes “our babies.” He tells her she should never give them up. She tells him that if she dies the city will send some cleaners into the apartment and the tapes will be thrown away.
He tells her she’ll never die and then leaves the room.
Won’t discuss it.
5.
The unspoken scenario in the Robin Byrd thing, and maybe I’m overthinking this, is that she’ll make the responsible decision to preserve her and Shelly’s legacy by surrendering the tapes and then every morning her husband will wake up heartbroken to see them gone, and he won’t remember what happened, and so every day she’ll have to explain it, breaking his heart, unless she decides to lie to him, saying the archive has borrowed them, they’re out getting copied, they’ll be back any day.
The movie ends with Byrd celebrating her 70th birthday. The filmmakers wanted her to walk naked on the beach but she said no, her body’s not the same, she’s too self-conscious. Then she changed her mind. Said it’d basically be a middle finger to all the positivity she spent her life preaching.
And so that’s how the movie ends: Robin Byrd at 70 saying fuck it, walking around naked, standing on a dock, watching the sunset.
6.
I never saw those expensive gummies again until right here, at Target, in a full sumptuous bag with kidney-ish heft costing only $4.99. So I bought it.
On the phone with Mo I ate the gummy bears and loosened up and talked like relative normal until my earbuds crapped out.
It was a little after 4 p.m. on a workday and instead of bagging groceries I walked to the bar, sat in a booth, opened my laptop and wrote this.
I asked if I could quote this. “Sure. My ego says no but there’s not enough ball busting on Substack.”
The gummies and the tapes are doing the same work and you never once say so, which is what I liked. One only tasted like that because it cost a dollar a bear. The other only survives if she hands it over. Also the pistachio nutmeat man is a complete character in four lines and I resent how easy you made that look.
The condom comparison was 🤌. A great read for me and congrats on quitting. I’m at a crossroads, myself, so it’s nice to hear of a writer living as a writer.