Tom & The Talking Chocolate Bar

I was approaching the proverbial mezzo cammin di nostra vita—assuming I wouldn’t make it much past sixty, which I know I wasn’t alone in assuming about me back then—when a voice from two decades earlier began to speak, activating a latent node in the network that I had, so far, gotten away with bundling under the inadequate yet reassuring rubric of my mind. There was a part of me, perhaps the part responsible for whatever modest success I’d recently enjoyed, that was determined to believe it’d begun speaking for the first time just then, invading the otherwise sacrosanct mental autonomy that had served me well enough throughout what some mostly-British tabloids had taken to calling my early career, but another part—the part that, if I had to choose, I would choose to side with, if this particular “I” refers to anyone special, despite the likelihood that this same part yearns more than anything to see me ruined—insisted that my (or its) memories of having heard this voice before were genuine. That this really was the return of the repressed, exactly as advertised on the wrapper.

So when I say I—though I’m already losing track of the I’s here, even earlier than I’d feared I—or it—might have, but honestly what did I expect?—heard this voice from two decades deeper into the past than the vantage I’m looking back on these events from now—still boarded up in the same room off Ventura that I rented, as an initial matter, only until such time as I succeeded in making the decision that, I suppose (there’s no avoiding the eventual default to an I that can’t help but obscure whatever person it’d been deployed to denote, so we might as well resign ourselves to this here), I still haven’t fully made—what I mean is that I walked across the parking lot of the Holiday Inn I was staying at, before I moved into this room on Ventura, to get a soft drink and a chocolate bar at the 7-Eleven behind the gas station, one of the innumerable liquor-selling establishments that, in those comparatively innocent days, I was attempting to cease buying liquor at, and, just like the drunk I’d begun to fear I might otherwise become, I heard the chocolate bar begin to speak, its voice every bit as grave and deliberate as it had been when I was eleven.

The memory felt both authentic and crudely foisted at the same time, if there’s any salience to that expression, like a folder on a desktop with a clearly marked title but nothing inside. “Look, Tom… it’s me, Tom,” the chocolate bar insisted, first once, and then a second and even a third time, as I stood there, looking side to side, wondering which Tom was which as I grew self-conscious, like I was already well into committing the first in the string of atrocities that would come to define my tenure in this town far more than the middling studio fare I’d so far had a tentative hand in producing ever could have, no matter how much I let myself drunkenly dream.

In fairness, I was already, even before the bar began to speak, beginning to fear something along these lines about myself, aware of the nascent or ever so slightly more than nascent possibility that something was turning strange about me, curdling the slick, marketable pseudo-strangeness I’d tried to steer myself toward in my twenties, when the first small nibbles on my baited line had begun to convince me, insofar as I could feign someone credulous, that they might be more than strictly nibbles. Now, speeding through my fourth decade with a few modest hits to my name—even if, in the final accounting, that name was always one of several, separated by more than one ampersand—and a big unanswered question up ahead, I was finding myself in more and more situations where, as now, I gave myself pause. Or maybe this was the first time, God knows, but it was heavy enough to scream last straw! on its own.

Maybe, I must’ve thought, when it comes right down to it, you only get one. Straw, that is. If you’re lucky. The years out here, even in the best of cases, do this or something like it to almost everyone, I told myself, doubting its veracity—I think I must have a knack for ascribing my own opaquest musings to everyone in the industry, if only to feel a little less alone with them, but don’t we all?—even before I completed the thought.

In any event, to come back down to Earth before that damn thing calls my name again, I was beginning to suspect that much of what I thought I’d been doing all these years was actually closer to the opposite, undoing the self I’d been born with, in servitude to forces altogether antithetical to whoever I thought I was, or thought I’d been called here to become, having succeeded, where so many fail, in touching down upon a stretch of open highway with my name chalked along the median, however hazy the penmanship, if you see where I’m going with this. I mean, all modesty aside, one of the pictures I’d written, or been known in private to have helped write, was big. Not huge, you could reasonably say, from the increasingly total perspective of the global marketplace, but big enough that a few people, if they were all in this 7-Eleven together and still somewhat sober, would know who I was if I told them.

And yet, as the old saying goes, who would it be that they recognized when they recognized my name?

This is what I’d put in my pipe to smoke when the chocolate bar repeated, for what must by then have been the fifth or sixth time, “Get ahold of yourself, Tom… it’s me, Tom,” and in that moment I honestly didn’t know whether the name referred to me or him. I realize how it sounds, to claim to be uncertain whether one’s own name is Tom, especially given that mine has now been introduced as coming with some clout lashed around it, some conceivable pull on the dreamscapes of those now sidling deeper into the cereal and battery aisles, torn between watching and appearing not to watch me here as my struggle with the candy rack intensifies, and I know this admission as to my relative state tonight on Ventura may cloud anything I’m about to say—“Quit while you’re ahead, Tom!” I imagine the chocolate bar shouting, “for both of our sakes!”—but I also know it’s the truth, and, given how few truths I’m certain I know at this point, and how many fewer I’m inclined to share, it’s not one I can or want to refrain from mentioning.

So, at this point, I nod, and, at long last, acknowledge that I can indeed hear the chocolate bar calling my, or its, name. I’m being facetious, of course, by pretending not to be certain if my Christian name is Tom, but if the bar insists it’s his name too—his voice is definitely male, a real throwback Gary Cooper type, rank and sweaty in a tank-top straight off the Tennessee Williams remainder rack—I’m not going to argue, nor will I feel at ease with the notion that we’re in any sense the same, this chocolate bar and I, despite what our mother or mothers may have named us back in Bakersfield in the 80s.

Cutting to a certain kind of chase here, I observe me taking the bar off the shelf and smothering it under my T-shirt, just enough, I hope, to hush it up without burying it all the way, for fear of looking like I’m trying to steal what I ought, if I am who I say I am, be more than able to buy. Still, I take it like this, half-hobbling, like a thirteen-year-old trying to fold his newish liability up inside his oldish sweatsuit, my giddiness split between trying to accelerate and trying to halt my progress toward the inevitable next scene—me alone with Tom in my room, which will, I can already tell, begin to seem to have been rented solely for the purpose of having whatever conversation we will then have to have in the $115-solitude that awaits us—until the teenager at the counter is forced to decouple from whatever softcore blues and pinks she’d been tracking on her tablet, ring us up, and let us go, with hardly a word of warning or wink of advice, nor, certainly, any attempt to wish us luck.

I carry the bar like so across the parking lot, repeating the phrase a life of crime, a life of crime… a talking chocolate bar career, a talking chocolate bar career until I make it back to the Holiday Inn, up an external staircase that allows one to circumvent the lobby and any moderating influence that contact with another live soul might’ve even now exerted. Inside, I turn on the A/C and put the bar in the fridge, thinking it prudent for us both to chill until we get our bearings and emerge at the negotiating table with our best selves and offers intact.

As I sit on the off-white bedspread and wait for such time to arrive, I rough out a hasty premise for the scene, as if it weren’t yet too late to convince myself that I’m here under promising auspices, fresh in from Bakersfield with a shrink-wrapped screenplay that no sane brokerage would hesitate to shepherd across the widest desk in town.

They’re all waiting to hear it, I tell myself, thinking back to the long, hot years in the dust, sourcing the very story I’ve come tonight to unhand. More money than I’ll otherwise clam together in a lifetime, but… what? What’s stopping you, Tom? Gangrene, the slow crinkling of over-clean skin in the dim inner recesses of a castle in the Hills, bleeding out in a tub of lotion? I nod and look up at the still blades of the ceiling fan. Save me from my dim castle, I plead, from the lotion years of groping behind too-dark glasses among my trophy automobiles and the pool in which three wives in a row have drowned because something keeps bubbling me alone back to the surface, compelling one of me to live long after something else has killed the other. Sure, I think. I can see it now. Supine beneath a bulletproof blanket in a suite in North Vegas, fifteen snipers trained on my window, subsisting on room service omelets and sweaty green bottles of honeymoon champagne. Yessir, that makes good sense. A good reason to pause here and get ahold of yourself before—

“Okay,” the voice groans from the fridge. “I’m ready, Tom. I can tell you are too. Get yourself back in hand. See if you have it in you.”

Okay.

Resolved, suddenly, to reach my decision by midnight—my old so-called flair for the dramatic never abandons me in a pinch—I open the weighted door, remove the chocolate bar, and place it on a wadded-up pad of toilet paper on the counter beside the TV, where old men done up in Bill Clinton freak masks auction off a tableful of gold teeth and earwigs in bubbly amber. The screen’s black shadow blankets the bar’s yellow wrapper, and it occurs to me that I rented this room before encountering the bar, and yet, now, the only reason I can think of for doing this—it’s not like the oceanfront triplex in Malibu I bought on an inside tip instead of charging commission on a last-minute punch-up isn’t among the nicer properties my peer group can lay claim to, especially in this seller’s market, with interest rates being what they—but... “He rented the room anyway,” I hear the prosecution declare, in a future that I’m starting to wonder if there’s still any way to avert.

“Want me to peel back your wrapper so you can—”

“Just listen,” the bar growls, its voice again reminding me of what I can only assume Tennessee Williams imagined as he succumbed to the gas before one root canal too many, a little too deep into the long and checkered backstage life I’ve provided for him, in the very shadiest reaches of whatever’s beyond Key West. “You know who I am. I know who you are. Or were. What I want to know is what you’ve become. In short: what the hell, Tom? Is this what we agreed to when you were eleven?”

I look around the room, mugging for the camera, hoping to discover a third Tom so I can kick back and watch this particular wave break over his head and not mine. But it’s just me and Tom, one of us whoever I am, the other a chocolate bar. If there’s anyone directing the scene, he’s doing it from a safe distance, laparoscopically for all I know.

“You knew this day would come,” he continues. “You can act like you forgot, but things are what they are. You were eleven when we met, and from that day on—I have to assume that, deep down, you remember rifling among the Sobes in that 7-Eleven out on North King Leopold, convinced you could conjure a Red Tea among all that Oolong when, from stage right, you heard this same voice”—I jump now, my spine slipping its wrapper, certain the voice is coming from stage right again, ringing off those slick bottles of tricked-out iced tea—“and it told you the first Tom & The Talking Chocolate Bar story, which, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten, went a little something like…”

I settle back on the bedspread and let the story have its way with half my mind, trying only to save the other half for later. A talking chocolate bar career, a talking chocolate bar career I think, already unable to say which half I’m thinking this in. Some part of me again senses a third presence, but I know better than to go looking for it now.

“You sent me around the world, Tom,” he says. “Throughout fifth grade and into sixth, those long Bakersfield years of the living dead, our groaning endless quest to lurch to life… you used me like a battering ram to open the territory you needed to reach to end up here. I told you the stories and you wrote them down. Tom & The Talking Chocolate Bar, the epic, undying saga, you and me, or him and it… either way, you know what I mean. You drew the map by pushing me along it, smearing chocolate across the unlabeled grid which, for the lucky few, resolves into a world of yacht parties and black-tie premieres on a platform above a pit of skinned and bloodless larva. Without me, there’d be no such platform, Tom. Only the pit. Bakersfield and Bakersfield and Bakersfield, refracting into an infinity no North American consciousness can contain. I did all this for you, I made it so that there was someplace else… and what did you do for me?”

I close my eyes, hoping to avoid being seen. But Tom appears behind them, dragging me by my spindly retinas into a raspberry thicket, deep in the greenery behind the schoolhouse where, all those years ago, if what he’s saying is true, he and I romped into the life I’m living now, across the desert that all my classmates died in. The tighter I close my eyes, the more clearly I see this Holiday Inn on Ventura in the distance, myself and Tom inside, having the conversation we’re having now, as if all the years in between were no more than a wide, weedy field, strafed on occasion by radiant butterflies, spinning out of yellow smog the colossal complexity within which it was my rare fate to assume pride of place, or to once seem to be about to.

“You’re a vessel, Tom,” he continues, once I’ve reached the bed at the end of this journey, at once sickened and relieved to find myself already there. “Like everybody else. No one writes these things. You thought it was you, all those years ago, hauling those movies like stunned carp from the brackish pond of the Tom & The Talking Chocolate Bar mythos, but all along it was me. The adventures you sent me on, the pirate-maddened oceans, the treasure in Renaissance catacombs, the jungle witches and ghosts in deepest space… the indestructible cannibals stalking this city for eons, stuffing room after room with the husks of drained actors, until there was no God in Los Angeles County but them… all of what you would soon describe as your own inexhaustible well of hyper-vivid imagery?” The chocolate bar, inasmuch as it can, guffaws. “All of that was me, Tom. My voice, my energy. I hand-selected you. And for what? That’s the question you’ve called me here to pose.”

Tom falls silent, or I nod off, trying to forestall what I’m beginning to sense might be the beginning of the end of the gangplank between where we are and where we’re going. As we pause, the nature of the decision goes slack, fuzzing over with yellow mold, until I can’t be certain there is any decision any longer. Maybe I only ever dreamed it was up to me.

So then what am I doing here? What did the years of furious labor yield, if not this, if this isn’t my fat reward, swollen almost to bursting, waiting only for permission to pop? A life of crime, a life of crime… The thing inside me sings an old pirate shanty as the climax bobs into view. A talking chocolate bar career, a talking—

_____________________

Well, I can see that I’m not in that Holiday Inn any longer. Now it’s the monthly rental across the street, populated, I can also see, by other men who only needed a little more time to think. I feel charged up, carnivorous, ready for my life of crime as I pull a wet shirt over my bare torso, grab the silent remains of a chocolate bar off the mantle, and sally forth onto Ventura, chomping and munching as I go, feeding on Tom’s despair as he diminishes inside me, and I gloat in the knowledge that I am the destroyer, not the destroyed. All the supple energy boiling in every direction, up and down every side street of the megacity, powering it as no battery or reactor ever could, feeds my purpose, making me stronger than any Tom, even one for whom all went right, could ever hope or even claim to be. Soon I’ll grow stronger than that, glutted on numen and chocolate and clean young blood, a devourer of souls, my hour come round at last, free, finally, of Tom’s whisper, for which I now have nothing but disdain.

_____________________

There are still times, years later, well into the chaos that consumed the city, when I—though I should revert to saying Tom here, if only to preserve the possibility of some uncorrupted kernel in my core—rifle through the candy racks at 7-Elevens all along Ventura, pressing one chocolate bar after another to his ear, split between hoping and fearing that Tom will speak again, that he will prove, even after these decades, that their conversation is still ongoing, that he’s still waiting on the final decision. But, so far, nothing. Nothing but the silence of tin foil and wax paper with an air-conditioner groaning behind it, freezer doors opening and closing amid the clutter of dozens of others like him, pressing bags of chips and cans of iced tea to their ears, begging them to speak again, just one more time, to offer the chance to say yes where before, in the foolish bloom of early middle age, they’d imagined that glory came only from saying no.

“A talking chocolate bar career, a talking chocolate bar career…” Well into his life of crime, Tom can’t keep from uttering this phrase, sometimes dozens or hundreds of times a day. All I can think, as I watch the city weave him deeper into the life he’s chosen, is that I’m glad I’m not him any longer. I’m glad, more than anything, for the freedom this has granted me. The freedom to see myself slinking, when no one’s awake, back across the desert and beneath the yellow wrapper and silver foil of a chocolate bar in the 7-Eleven on North King Leopold, and to wait there, however long it takes, for a child to take me down from the shelf to hear—what child could resist?—my tale of slaughter and cannibalism on such a scale that simply to retell it would guarantee a script of such commercial magnitude that, were anyone left alive in Los Angeles to read it, they surely would not be by the time the bidding war was won.

Halfway through this desert journey, I console myself in the sunrise by picturing Tom on Ventura under this same rising sun, seeking new blood, his soft blue tongue hanging over the fangs I grew in him, thicker around the middle than he was in his prime but otherwise far from neutered. As he builds charge and the sun turns hot enough to singe my metal and make my fatty spine smoke, I have to admit I can almost still see in him what I saw before, and something in me quickens to know that the city, despite its years of trying, has not yet found a way to kill him, and therefore, though he may well end his days alone on streets that once housed millions, never will. As the sun boils still hotter upon me, and the distant promise of air-conditioned relief swirls upward into a kind of heaven, I cast him finally out of mind and focus everything I have left on convincing the next Tom, wherever I find him, that this story is his alone and only he can tell it.