Sugar Blues

By William Dufty, 1975

Chapter 1: It Is Necessary to Be Personal

Once upon a time, when I was a hopeless square about sucrose (C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁), I triggered an unforgettable encounter between Gloria Swanson and a sugar cube.

I had been summoned to a lunchtime press conference in the Fifth Avenue office of a New York attorney. Things were well along when I tiptoed in. Miss Swanson, more alert and thoughtful than anyone in the room, removed her purse from the chair at her side and made room for me. I had never seen her offscreen before. I was not expecting to see her there. I was not ready for her at all.

A caterer’s coolie arrived with the picnic — pastrami on rye, salami on pumpernickel, cardboard jugs of coffee, a tray of monogrammed sugar cubes. My colleagues from several New York daily newspapers kept on wrangling as the rations were scattered around. I unwrapped my sandwich, sprung the lid off of my coffee jug, picked up a sugar cube. I was unpeeling it when I heard her commanding whisper:

That stuff is poison, she hissed. I won’t have it in my house, let alone my body.

I drew back from the precipice and looked at her. Those immense blue eyes widened, her signature tombstone teeth gleamed in that bite beyond the smile. She was Carrie Nation confronting demon rum, William Jennings Bryan beholding the Cross of Gold, Moses with a pork chop on his plate. Like a child caught with one mitt in the cookie jar, I dropped the sugar cube. I noticed the space in front of Miss Swanson was bare of clutter. She wasn’t having any of our picnic. She had brought her own — a piece of tree-ripened, unsprayed something. She offered me some. I had never tasted anything better in my life. I told her so.

Of course, we had all heard the legends about Swanson’s exotic health regimen. Poems have been written about her age-defying presence. Seeing her close up, eyeball to eyeball, it was impossible to doubt that she must be doing something right.

I used to get positively livid when I watched people eating poison, she whispered. But I’ve learned that everyone has to find out for themselves — the hard way. They can eat ground glass in front of me now and I don’t even twitch. Go ahead, she said, daring me to mix sugar in my coffee. Eat your white sugar — kill yourself. See if I care.

Again she flashed the bite beyond the smile. It haunted me for days. Whenever I reached for those sugar tongs, I would draw back and think of her injunction. You never know you’re hooked until you decide with your noodle that you’re not going to do something anymore; then you discover your head is not running things. I discovered I had a sugar habit and a big one. I wanted to kick it but I didn’t know how. I’d had it for years.

I must have been hooked very early because my earliest memory of mealtime at home with the family was a kind of purgatory of meat and potatoes which I suffered through in order to get to heaven: A sweet dessert.

Grandma always kept a hundred-pound bag of good Michigan beet sugar in the pantry off her kitchen with a generous tin scoop on top. When I picked dandelions for her during Prohibition, she washed them and put them in a huge crock to soak, sprinkled sugar and lemon over them — for speedy fermenting — and thus produced bootleg wine. I remember her scattering sugar on the tops of cherry and apple pies, in cookies and fried cakes, and in huge, boiling vats of peaches and plums at canning time in the autumn. Sugar went into tomato relish and all kinds of pickles, sweet and sour. When we came home from school, Mrs. Moulton, our neighbor and full-time cook, would give us fresh-baked bread spread with butter and heaps of brown sugar on top.

It is possible to remember, but hard to believe what it was like to live in a small Midwestern town of fifty years ago that has gone forever. The family controlled what children put into their stomachs, completely and utterly. We had very little to say about it. Our parents were our protectors. Everyone knew what they would permit and what they would not permit. It was no more possible to sneak a hamburger or a Coca-Cola than it was to rob a bank or miss church on Sunday.

The town only had one restaurant. It had once been a saloon. If I walked into a local emporium with a nickel to buy something edible, the owner would have called my father at his office and I would hear about it when he came home. The three grocery stores each had candy counters, and the drugstore on the corner had a soda fountain. Ice cream was something you had on Sunday and you made it yourself. On state occasions, it might be ordered from the drugstore and delivered on the run by a local track star. Dry ice and freezers were something out of the year 2001.

Breakfast, dinner, and supper were eaten at home — with Mrs. Moulton as warden — or not at all. There was no way to open the icebox without her watchful presence. Then we became the first family in town to have a Frigidaire. Homemade ice cubes were an invention more wondrous and mysterious than the radio. The cellar began to fall into disuse. Canning began to give way to store-bought things.

Soda pop, Coca-Cola, and the like of soft drinks simply did not exist for us. Canada Dry ginger ale was around, but that was part of Daddy’s Prohibition stash, something for grownups to drink sometimes with their Canadian hooch. It was years later, when I was eight, that a visitor from the outside world introduced the decadent idea of floating ice cream in a glass of the stuff. We might have known about such things earlier had we been permitted to view those corrupting movies — but they were beyond the pale, across the other side of the railroad tracks. Cotton candy and other confections sold at fairs and bazaars were as verboten as films. It will make you sick, we were told. When we noticed other youngsters eating it without going into convulsions, we would call this to our parents’ attention, but such pseudoscientific evidence never cut any ice.

My first sins occurred during our first summer at Crystal Lake. Compared to the town where we lived, Crystal Lake was Babylon or Las Vegas. It had a casino over the water where strangers danced in the dark to a band that claimed (on the side of their bus and the front of the drums) to be from Hollywood. There was a golf course, tennis courts and speed boats, Indians selling handwoven baskets to weekend tourists, girls who smoked cigarettes, boys who went in swimming at night without any tops, and roadside gas pumps with shanties where bottles of technicolored sugarwater were always on ice: orange, cherry, strawberry, lemon, and something called Green River. I never lost any sleep over those, familiar flavors. The deep purple grape started me on the road to perdition. I had never tasted anything like it at home. The grape pop trip got to be something I couldn’t control. I began to feel a secret kinship with the town drunk.

I remember the first time I rifled my mother’s purse while she was napping. I only took a nickel. One nickel at a time. If she didn’t have a nickel in change, I didn’t dare take a dime. Two bottles might amount to an overdose for all I knew. My gums might turn a telltale purple or my teeth might start to dissolve. Somehow, I knew how much temptation I could handle; I was careful not to blow the whole thing.

We spent our summers at Crystal Lake until I was twelve or thirteen. By that time I was making $75 a week in the wintertime season — an undreamed of fortune in those days — as a prodigal jazz pianist on the radio. But I couldn’t write out a check at a roadside stand. When my summer grape pop habit got out of control, I had to lie, cheat, and steal to support it.

The day my voice began to change was the beginning of the end of my radio career. If my voice didn’t sound childlike anymore, there was nothing remarkable about the way I played piano. Puberty brought other terrors. My face, neck, and back exploded with unsightly pimples. At first, I thought it was leprosy and I made a few novenas. I had never noticed anything like this on older boys before. Perhaps I could overlook their flaws, but not my own. I was ashamed to wear the topless swimming trunks that were coming into fashion. The family nurse suggested Noxzema. The family laundress was thrilled when that didn’t work.

I know now I was suffering for my sins. If anybody had had the perception to point it out to me at the time, they might have saved me years of agony. But who knew about my secret sugar habit? Who ought to have guessed? Where was the family doctor?

Well, our town had one, but he wasn’t Dr. Marcus Welby. He lived across the street from us, and one of the terrors the whole town lived with was the thought of possible emergency when no one was on hand except Dr. Hudson. For Dr. Hudson was a dope fiend. Those words were spoken of others, never of him. The people of the town merely said Poor Mrs. Hudson. The good doctor sometimes walked about town like a zombie. He had a detached bungalow office behind the house. After dark, the kids used to sneak up to his windows and peep in to see him lying on his black leather chair with the stirrups — completely out of it.

When there was an accident in town, volunteer firemen would break down the door of the doctor’s office, douse him with water, and stand over him while he put a tourniquet on a farmer’s arm that had been caught in a thresher. Then they would rush the victim to the nearest town. If you could afford it, as we could, you summoned the doctor from the next town by telephone.

So none of us ever saw a doctor until we were good and sick. The appalling significance of things that never happened. I was sent to the dentist twice a year — when that came into fashion. The dentist related cavities to overdoses of sweets. But I never heard a doctor open his mouth about it.

The old-timers like Grandma spoke about eating excesses: It will make you sick, that meant ill to your stomach — in danger of vomiting and such. How could I relate my skin problems to my secret vices? I began noticing that lots of boys my age had similar skin disorders — but not all. Then I heard rumors out behind the bam that my affliction could be caused by excessive masturbation.

I had a friend whose brother was in a Catholic seminary in Chicago, studying to be a priest. He was the big authority on canon law and sex. He spread the word that in the archdiocese of Chicago, masturbating was only a venial sin. If you did it in Michigan, it was mortal. In Illinois, you could have a one-man show at night, wash your pants under the pump in the morning, and trot off to communion.

I took to drowning my sorrows in malted milks, which I discovered in high school. We had moved to a large city by then, and I had to travel several miles downtown to a central high school. I was allowed ten cents a day for streetcar fare — a nickel each way. Lunch out of a box? I refused to carry anything as unchic as homemade sandwiches and fruit. The 1929 crash was behind us, things were tough all over. A cut-rate drugstore downtown was pushing a special king-sized chocolate malted — all you could possibly drink for a dime. For two years, I walked every morning and night in all kinds of weather — just so I could blow that dime and guzzle five malteds every week. My skin problems went from bad to worse. I remember being mortified when I had to take a shower at the school gym. Then I heard rumors that acne could be caused by sexual repression. Free souls, I was told, didn’t have that kind of problem. I was more than willing to take the plunge — more out of hope of relief from pimples than pent-up passion. Getting a girl into trouble, contracting VD, these were terrors I would gladly embrace if I could walk shamelessly into juvenile court with that skin you love to touch.

In our high school set nobody smoked. Cigarettes were far too expensive at ten cents a pack and were considered vaguely unmasculine. Many boys lived with a vision of the Ford roadster they would inherit at graduation if they abstained from tobacco. Meanwhile, we smoked untaxed, homegrown things like dried corn silk, dead grapevine — even something the Mexicans called marijuana. All of them made me sick. I could get a better high off a banana split. We never dreamed that Mexican stuff would be merchandised a few decades later like bootleg beer.

In the twenties, I had been so rich I never carried a cent on me. In the thirties — mooching my way through college holding a job or two on the side — I was so poor I put every cent on my back where it would show. I remember starving with great elegance — going without lunch in a chalk-striped British flannel suit with a stiff Duke-of-Kent collar and contrasting shirt. College was a complete and utter drag — a boring kind of mandatory sentence you had been told you had to serve. I took to collegiate journalism as a kind of lark. There I discovered that the cigarette companies virtually subsidized the university paper with their advertising. Some of the best-looking girls on campus worked for the tobacco companies as cigarette pushers — giving away free cigarettes and offering free instruction in inhaling the way Constance Bennett and Bette Davis did in the films. I smoked the free ones but I never developed the habit of buying them. I would always reach for a sweet in preference to a Lucky Strike.

One of the boring things we were required to suffer through was a course called physical education. One was required to swim or trot or play volleyball or lift weights for a certain number of hours each week. They watched you do it, your card was punched, and that was that. Once a year you had a quick cursory physical exam. If you asked the young doctor a question about something that was bothering you, he was careful not to tread on the terrain of the local medical society. See your family doctor about that, he would say. His job was to spot latent hernias and athletes’ foot.

On summer vacation, I hitchhiked thousands of miles and lived on Pepsi-Cola in those large, economy-sized nickel bottles. It was not until I visited the South for the first time that a girl turned me onto something called dope. They served it at soda fountains with lots of crushed ice, vanilla flavoring, syrup, and soda. Up North, it was called Coca-Cola. Down there, common usage preserved overtones of its native origins as a headache remedy.

After suffering through two years of college, I finally dropped out. It took daring in those days to dream of facing life without a degree. But I could sniff another war in the offing. I felt my real choice was going to be between Leavenworth Penitentiary and Flanders’ fields.

In the summer of 1965, I met a wise man from the East, a Japanese philosopher who had just returned from several weeks in Saigon. If you really expect to conquer the North Vietnamese, he told me, you must drop Army PXs on them — sugar, candy, and Coca-Cola. That will destroy them faster than bombs.

I knew what he was talking about. When I was drafted in 1942, something like that happened to me. Army food was decreed from on high somewhere. We were, as every mother was assured, the best-fed troops in all human history. But army chow set my teeth on edge from the very start. I wanted no part of it. So morning, noon, and night I haunted the Post Exchange. It was a two-year orgy of malted milks, sugared coffee, pastry, candy, chocolate, and Coca-Cola. After many months of that, I developed a fancy case of bleeding hemorrhoids which scared me to death. I always associated this gruesome malady with advanced age, and here I was in my twenties. Nothing mattered too much anyway, I was headed for Flanders’ fields where all was lost.

My first real adult experience with the American medical establishment was with its caricature — U.S. army medicine. In due course, my body was shipped overseas. Bound for Britain, I trotted around the top deck of the blacked-out S.S. Mauretania with a carbine on my shoulder and a heavy army greatcoat soaked with Atlantic spray. Two hours on, two off. By the time we docked at Liverpool, I had a lovely case of walking pneumonia. The medic looked at my thermometer and sent me packing back to KP duty. This went on for six days. Finally, on the seventh day, the thermometer hit the lucky number. Bells rang, faces softened into sympathy, they rushed me onto a stretcher and the ambulance careened to the nearest British hospital! Intensive care, an oxygen tent, and huge doses of the wonder drug of the time — sulfanilamide. It was then so new a drug that blood samples were taken every hour on the hour to make sure they weren’t killing me. I lapsed into a lovely coma and stayed there for days. Wonderful, sweet-smelling nurses changed the bed regularly, poked me for blood, bathed me lovingly all over. Charming, upper-class British ladies comforted me with lilacs. The chaplain lurked in the outer hall. It began to look as though I’d never make it to Flanders’ fields. It didn’t seem worth the effort. D-day was just around the corner.

Then I awoke one morning, sweating, conscious. I saw some calf’s-foot jelly on my table and I sensed an erection. The army had outwitted me! I’d been foiled, doomed to survive for a while longer at the convenience of the government.

When I toddled down the hall the first time to be weighed, the nurses gasped when they saw the scale. Army regulations said you could not be discharged from the hospital until you weighed as much as when you came in; if you stayed in the hospital more than twenty-eight days, you returned not to your outfit but to a Repple Depple — a replacement depot where bodies were warehoused, waiting for orders in your size, weight, and classification. My outfit was hardly Shangri-la, but the Repple Depple was a fate worse than death. Could I put on twelve pounds in six days? Each day, British newsboys came through the hospital peddling bad news. I bought three papers every day, always paying with a pound note. The heavy coins I received in change were fastened to my midriff and groin with hospital tape. Every day when they weighed me in, I had gained a couple of pounds by magic. On D-day, I climbed the scale triumphantly. My weight was back to the level it had been when I entered the hospital. Within hours I was with my outfit, headed for Flanders’ fields. My buddies nursed me and protected me and brought me back to life by carting me goodies from the PX — I was too weak to get there myself.

Eventually, I was packed off by train to Glasgow, by ship to Algiers, then by truck to Oran in the Mediterranean. Three weeks in the desert and I was as good as new. There was no PX for miles. My only diversions were the ocean and Algerian beer. After the landings in southern France, I was packed off to join the First French Army: Arabs, Senegalese, Goums, Sikhs, Vietnamese, with French officers and noncoms. We lived off the land, no fancy rations and luxuries. Some brought along pots and pans, ducks and geese, sheep and goats, wives and mistresses. For months I went unpaid, I had to forage for clothes and shoes, and I never saw the inside of a PX again. Most of the natives we ate with hadn’t tasted sugar in years. It was all on the black market. We lived on horsemeat, rabbit, squirrel, dark French peasant bread, and whatever else could be scrounged. Winter in the Vosges mountains was brutal and endless, yet I never had a cold or a sniffle. I was never sick for a day in the eighteen months I spent in France and Germany with them.

Was I bright enough to understand this controlled experiment in nutrition I’d been unwittingly involved in? I might have saved myself years of waste, but I was a total idiot, without half the brain or instinct for survival possessed by the lice in my helmet.

On my return to the States, I went on a glorious bender: Pie à la mode, cake with whipped cream, malted milks by the dozen, chocolate, and Pepsi. Sugar … sugar … sugar.

Within weeks I was flat on my back with one strange malady after another. My hemorrhoids blossomed. Every day my fever rose and fell. Batteries of tests produced names of diseases: Infectious mononucleosis, atypical malaria, hepatitis, shingles, exotic skin conditions, ear infections eye diseases. When I ran out of money, I discovered the wonders of socialized medicine at the Veterans Administration. I became a charter member of Blue Cross and Blue Shield. I enrolled in one of the first prepaid group medical plans. For over fifteen years, I subjected myself to an endless whirligig of doctors, hospitals, diagnosis, treatment, tests and more tests, drugs and more drugs. During all that rigamarole, I cannot recall a single doctor (out of the dozens who treated me) who ever displayed the slightest curiosity about what I ate and drank.

Inevitably, the day arrived when the drugs were no longer effective. Migraine headaches would not go away. For ten days I couldn’t work, sleep, eat, or move. I checked into the VA Hospital in Manhattan as an emergency case. I simply could not endure the pain any longer. They gave me the works: batteries of tests and a physical as complete as I’d ever had. After all the machines had spoken, the young doctor translated it all for me. No cancer, no brain tumor, no this, no that. In fact, he smiled happily, I was a perfect specimen, normal in every respect for my age.

Incredulous, I stammered: But what do I do about the headaches. If they don’t go away in a week or two, he suggested, come back anytime.

A week or two? I was ready for the worst and this was it. I couldn’t endure another hour. I telephoned a friend whose father had been a famous physician. He had connections with a fancy society physician on Park Avenue. They took out a huge forbidding syringe and sprayed something very cool up my nostrils. After a nap, I had my first relief in days. I knew enough about drugs to know it had been cocaine. Well, I thought, this is how junkies begin.

Then my friend put me on a diet. This seemed bizarre but I decided to humor him. I didn’t know anywhere else to get cocaine. He took me off cigarettes and coffee, suggested oatmeal in the morning, rice for lunch, and more rice and chicken for dinner. His diagnosis: Postural hypotension — slowing down of circulation. He also prescribed hot baths morning and night and calisthenics at midday. I tried giving up coffee and cigarettes, but it made it almost impossible for me to work. My day began with coffee — huge jugs of it with sugar and cream. I might have four or five before noon. After that destroyed my appetite for lunch, I would taper off on Pepsi-Cola. By dinner time, I was in such a sugar stupor it took Chinese duck or lobster k diablo to rouse my appetite. I tried his diet and got temporary relief. Then I would binge until the headaches returned. Then I would try again. I was learning, but I didn’t realize it at the time.

One night, in one sitting, I read a little book that said very simply that if you’re sick, it’s your own damn fault. Pain is the final warning. You know better than anyone else how you’ve been abusing your body, so stop it. Sugar is poison, it said, more lethal than opium and more dangerous than atomic fallout. Shades of Gloria Swanson and the sugar cube. Hadn’t she told me everyone has to find out for themselves — the hard way? I had nothing to lose but my pains. I began next morning with firm resolve. I threw all the sugar out of my kitchen. Then I threw out everything that had sugar in it, cereals and canned fruit, soups and bread. Since I had never really read any labels carefully, I was shocked to find the shelves were soon empty; so was the refrigerator. I began, eating nothing but whole grains and vegetables.

In about forty-eight hours, I was in total agony, overcome with nausea, with a crashing migraine. If pain was a message, this was a long one, very involved, intense but in code. It took hours to break the code. I knew enough about junkies to recognize reluctantly my kinship with them. I was kicking cold turkey, the thing they talked about with such terror. After all, heroin is nothing but a chemical. They take the juice of the poppy and they refine it into opium and then they refine it to morphine and finally to heroin. Sugar is nothing but a chemical. They take the juice of the cane or the beet and they refine it to molasses and then they refine it to brown sugar and finally to strange white crystals. It’s no wonder dope pushers dilute pure heroin with milk sugar — lactose — in order to make their glassine packages a treat to the eye. I was kicking all kinds of chemicals cold turkey — sugar, aspirin, cocaine, caffeine, chlorine. fluorine sodium, monosodium glutamate, and all those other multisyllabic horrors listed in fine print on the tins and boxes I had just thrown into the trash.

I had it very rough for about twenty-four hours, but the morning after was a revelation. I went to sleep with exhaustion, sweating, and tremors. I woke up feeling reborn. Grains and vegetables tasted like a gift from the gods.

The next few days brought a succession of wonders. My rear stopped bleeding, so did my gums. My skin began to clear up and had a totally different texture when I washed. I discovered bones in my hands and feet that had been buried under bloat I bounced out of bed at strange hours in the early morning, raring to go. My head seemed to be working again. I had no problems anymore. My shirts were too big. So were my shoes. One morning while shaving I discovered I had a jaw.

To make a long, happy story short, I dropped from 205 pounds to a neat 135 in five months and ended up with a new body, a new head, a new life.

One day I burned my Blue Cross card. About that time, I noticed a picture of Gloria Swanson in The New York Times. I sat right down and wrote her a letter. You were right, I said. Wow, were you ever right. I didn’t get your message then but I’ve got it now.

That was in the 1960s. Since then I have been sugar-free. I haven’t been near a doctor, a hospital, a pill, or a shot in all that time. I haven’t even touched so much as an aspirin.

Today, when I see someone unpeeling a sugar cube, I twitch just as I remember Gloria Swanson twitching at that lunchtime press conference. I yearn to collar them in some quiet corner and tell them how easy it is to lose the sugar blues.

Consider yourself collared. What have you got to lose?

SUGAR BLUES

Ev’rybody’s singing the Sugar Blues …
I’m so unhappy, I feel so bad I could lay me down and die.
You can say what you choose but I’m all confused.
I’ve got the sweet, sweet Sugar Blues More Sugar!!
I’ve got the sweet, sweet Sugar Blues.

The song Sugar Blues was published in 1923, the year the United States rocked with the Teapot Dome scandal and millions of sugar diabetics began shooting up with a newly discovered miracle drug, insulin.

1923 was also the heyday of Prohibition. When booze became illegal here, sugar consumption zoomed. The whole country acted like a gathering of arrested alcoholics spending the evening at AA; they couldn’t keep their mitts out of the candy jar. Teetotalers were often the biggest sugar fiends, vowing alcohol would never touch their lips while pouring in the sugar which produces alcohol in tummies instead of bathtubs.

Like other nemeses in the black blues experience — gin, cocaine, morphine, and heroin — sugar happened to be white. The lyric of Sugar Blues shrewdly conveys the antagonistic polarity of human experience with sweet and perilous white stuff: attraction, repulsion, the Gimme-Stop-Me, Get-Away-Closer, Pull-It-Out-Deeper feeling at the root of the blues. Natural body wisdom tells you it’s no good, and yet you want it baaaaaad.

Sugar Blues began as a song celebrating a completely personal human condition. It deserves, fifty years later, to become the universal name for an addictive planetary plague.

Poets — especially the ones who write the nation’s songs — are often years ahead of physicians and politicians at coming up with the proper name for global malaise.

I haven’t managed to discover or reveal in the succeeding pages everything I always wanted to know about sugar and was afraid to find out. However, I’ve learned enough to conclude that what passes for medical history needs to be bulldozed and overhauled.

In the eternal order of the universe, man-refined sugar, like all other things, plays its part. Perhaps the sugar pushers are our predators, leading us into temptation, peddling a kind of sweet, sweet, human pesticide which lures greedy seekers after La Dolce Vita into self-destruction, weeding the human garden, naturally selecting the fittest for survival while the rest go down in another biblical flood — not water this time, but Coke, Pepsi, and Dr. Pepper — purifying the human race for a new age.

In general, the practicing scientist hardly concerns himself with history, says Dr. Francois Jacob, Nobel prize winner and author of The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity? (The New York Times, April 11, 1974.) I was not happy about the way they tell the history of biology. In each paper, a scientist writes what his predecessors learned, and so forth, and winds up with a linear history, from error to truth. It’s not like that.

It sure ain’t.