The history of my childhood is in large part the story of my relationship with sugar—a relationship that began innocently, free of complications. Like most children, my first taste of sugar spawned a boundless appetite for it. I had neither the ability nor any reason to check this desire. At the age of four I’d rise before dawn, tiptoe past my parents’ bedroom, and enter the dark kitchen of our small country house. Using drawers as steps, I’d climb onto the counter and reach for the can of Nestle’s Quik in the cupboard. I ate that chocolate powder by the spoonful. One of the first words I learned to read was “DON’T,” which I found one morning written on the Quik can in stern capital letters, underlined twice. I studied the new word carefully as I spooned out the powder and let it dissolve on my tongue, squirming in the instant euphoria.

My parents learned to hide the Quik, but I moved on to candy: colorful, vibrant, sugar-packed candy. Desserts like pie and cake were not enough; full as they were of superfluous ingredients such as flour and eggs, they seemed hopelessly dull. If I couldn’t have candy, I would eat sugar right out the bowl, au naturel. My sugar obsession lost its cuteness in a hurry, and my parents realized I had a problem. Sugar became harder to find in the house as my access to it was regulated and negotiated. On Halloween my parents gave me a choice: I could eat two pieces of candy a day as long as it lasted, or eat all of it within two days. They thought I would learn a painful but important lesson when I invariably chose the second option, but while I’m sure I ate myself sick, I don’t recall learning anything. Appreciation of consequences was not my strong suit.

Nor did I understand that there simply wasn’t enough room in my tiny body for the massive amounts of sugar I put in it when I got the chance. Sometimes my mother used the long drapes in our dining room as a kind of improvised treatment facility. “Crazy curtain!” she would command when the sugar-fueled laps I ran on supercharged legs became too much for our little house, especially when the Vermont weather was bad and shoving me out the front door wasn’t an option. And I would go to the drapes and roll myself up in them, spinning until I was thickly cocooned in the fabric; and there, in the darkness of all that cloth, I would be still.

What was it I needed so badly when I begged for sugar? I loved it so much I was sure it existed for me alone. Maybe the importance of sugar in a child’s life rises in proportion to the pain of being weaned from his mother’s breast. If that’s the case, then it was a traumatic weaning for me, indeed. To be denied sugar was the ultimate injustice—cruel, senseless, baffling. My parents said it was bad for me and made me bad, but these claims were meaningless. I had the empirical evidence of my blissful sugar highs. It’s not surprising that parents learn to use sugar as their carrot and stick—they give it as bribes for good behavior and withhold it as punishment for mischief. The strength of sugar as currency leads kids to prize it all the more.

In time, I learned that not everyone felt as I did about sugar. Other families put gumdrops and jelly beans out in bowls, but the heaps never shrank. The use of sugar as decoration mystified me. Sugar was for devouring. Even fruit juice disappeared from my mother’s shopping list, because I would stand at the open fridge after school and chug the juice from the bottle, the sweet fructose and corn syrup coating my throat in gulp after luscious gulp.

Sugar was a versatile companion. In a few short years, life had become a lot more complicated: my parents divorced, we left our idyllic country home, and we now lived in the city, where I was often alone for hours after school while my father taught at a college an hour away. In my memory it’s usually winter at that house near the airport. The approach of adolescence was attended by the fear that I wouldn’t measure up. The bold lines of a self-assured childhood were gone. Sugar was no longer something I pursued merely for pleasure; I pursued it, it now seems clear enough, to distract myself from pain. I wasn’t the type to start my homework when I got home from school—I was the type to check my father’s pants and jackets for loose change that I could spend at Gino’s Airport Grocery. People talk about the wasted days of their youth; I spent mine wasted on sugar.

I think Gino’s was a real grocery, with bread and milk and vegetables, but I remember only the incredible abundance of candy, laid out on shelves that stretched from one end of the store to the other: Lemonheads, Jawbreakers, Smarties, Dinosour Eggs, Charleston Chews, Starbursts, red Swedish fish, Necco Wafers, Rolos, Atomic Fireballs, Red Hots. I pulled boxes from the shelves and held them next to my heart in the crook of my arm as I browsed. And even in winter I would buy a Slush Puppie—a cup of granulated ice saturated with brightly colored syrup. Back at home, I arranged this bounty in meticulous rows on the split pea–colored carpet in the TV room and watched reruns of “Three’s Company” and “Welcome Back, Kotter.” I was into alchemy, dumping the jawbreakers and Swedish fish into the Slush Puppie to observe the discoloring of the ice and the wonderfully stiff, extra-chewy consistency of the red gummy fish. I nibbled the candy through sitcom after sitcom, and would look down during commercials to rejoice in how much I still had left. It was amazing how much I could buy with my dad’s pocket change.

At Gino’s I was a favored customer, known by name to any member of the Todisco family who might be working the cash register on a given afternoon. Browsing the candy aisle in kingly fashion, I felt the beginnings of my consumer power. It never occurred to me that the awe I felt in Gino’s had been shrewdly elicited by candy companies that understood children’s need for diversion and novelty better than I did. For a no-frills sugar rush, there’s the direct assault of Pixi Stix (long paper tubes filled with flavored sugar). For a more contemplative experience, kids can have the stiff nougat of a Charleston Chew or the hard, sticky caramel of a Sugar Daddy. Candy shaped like lips and tongues add a sensual dimension, appealing to children’s latent eroticism. And sometimes kids want candy that exults in its very candyness, like the peerless Dip-Stix of my childhood: a wand made of pure sugar that you would lick and then dip into pouches of brightly colored sugar powder. It was a meta-candy.

Kids also like to test their mettle, and to experiment with pain. Atomic Fireballs in particular were exquisitely painful to eat, and I often had to hold them between my stained fingertips while my seared tongue recovered enough to let me throw the fiery cinnamon ball back in. Other candies were intensely sour. But most suffering-based candies had a sweet, mellow center. You could lick your way through the hot outer shell of an Atomic Fireball, or lightly crunch away the puckering hull of a Lemonhead, and you always arrived at a round ball of simple sugar underneath. The sweet center healed all wounds. You could tuck it into your cheek and forget about it for a few minutes, and then roll it back into the center of your mouth and explore with your tongue the desiccated area where the ball had been. Your tongue would irrigate the cracks, and you could taste and drink the sugar solution you made.

These simple pleasures took my mind off hurtful preoccupations: my short legs, my wrong clothes, my classmates who had liked me a year earlier but now knocked my books out of my hands in the hallway. I often rode the bus home in a state of seething despair, with angry words ready to spill from my lips. My father wanted to help, but my problems felt so complicated that I rarely had the energy or patience to describe them. It’s often easier for a child to swallow his pain than to talk about it. That was true for me, and I liked my pain washed down with sugar. Sugar comforted me. The feeling it gave me was unmistakably one of well-being. How could I resist it?

But even as I ramped up my consumption of sugar, I became aware of a vague sense of guilt. I had begun to realize that sugar could make me feel terrible as well as euphoric, that the exhaustion and frayed nerves I felt after gorging myself on candy were related to that gluttony. But I knew I couldn’t stop eating sugar, and I started to feel, perhaps unconsciously at first, that this pointed to a weakness of character. I was stuck between babyhood and adolescence; I hadn’t yet learned that my own body offered the means for self-gratification in the lonely hours after school. The obsessive impulse that gathers such strength at this age was still aimed outward, and sugar was the only target I knew. It was a cheap and reliable replacement for the feelings I was missing—feelings of safety, of security—and in the absence of a healthy alternative, I tried to ignore my creeping sense of sugar as a hollow and shameful fix.

A shameful fix was still a fix, after all, and I continued to devour sugar as naïvely as the deer in Yellowstone that become so accustomed to eating the junk food thrown to them by tourists that they can no longer digest vegetation. (Park rangers have to put these deer down.) The greater the insult to my fragile self, the more pathetically I reached for sugar. One day an older boy who lived at the end of my block backed me up against a fence and held me there with his football player’s hand while he shouted into my face. I thought he was going to punch me; I wish he had. Instead, he gave me a last shove and swaggered down the block, leaving me mortified at how afraid I had been, how small I had become. The tears began to flow before I made it inside my front door. I went straight to the freezer, unwrapped a Popsicle, and shoved it into my blubbering mouth like a frozen cherry thumb.

The road out of sugar addiction was a long one. Eventually I realized I could be as fanatical about avoiding it as I once was about eating it, and that this self-restraint offered its own (admittedly subtle) pleasures. So I’ve replaced Good n’ Plenty with almonds, Slush Puppies with carrot juice. This all makes me feel very virtuous and well-adjusted, of course—until my adult worries and stresses build up in such a way that the old ache for sugar throbs as if it had never died down. At such times I slow down as I drive by convenience stores at night, imagining the well-stocked candy aisles. Part of me still wishes, and in weak moments almost believes, that a grownup’s problems could be handled with a child’s solution.

Jonathan also teaches undergraduate writing classes and freelances as a writer and editor. “The Fine Print,” his column on English grammar and usage, was a regular feature of Multnomah Lawyer magazine.