Red it

Every time I see a Starburst candy I think of driver’s ed.

I was 16 and trying to stay awake through a lecture on the proper use of turn signals when the instructor glanced at his watch and indicated it was time for a 15-minute break. I remember blinking and looking around the room like I had just been jolted out of a months-long coma. The other students in the class – a handful of boys and girls around my age, plus one forty-ish woman who avoided us like we were knife-wielding locusts – all shared the same supine expressions of boredom. And what do you do when you’re bored and have a small break? You eat junk food and stare at the wall. Naturally.

The driving school was situated on lower Main Street in Lewiston, and the vending machine was just outside the front door, underneath an awning that looked as sad and weatherbeaten as the rest of downtown. The machine itself wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine. Far from being the colorful, reassuring vending machines of Disney theme parks and generic office buildings, this one was so barren and gummy with neglect it could have been a prop in a cheesy slasher movie. (The lack of Snickers foreshadowing a gruesome event; that kind of thing.) Surveying my options was a depressing exercise. It was either Starburst or a bag of old-looking trail mix that was probably a stiff breeze away from being dust. I picked the Starburst.

Say what you will about candy – it rots your teeth, it framed Roger Rabbit, etc. – but it got me through the ensuing lesson on not lingering in the blind spot of a Mack truck.

Zombie-like, I sat at my desk and systematically plowed through an entire sleeve of them. But as I munched, I noticed something strange happening: Without thought or planning, I had set aside all the red candies, piling them in a corner and saving them for last, to be devoured in a final orgy of berry bliss. Whenever I eat, I always save my favorite item for the end, for one last crescendo. I had done this with my Starburst without even thinking about it.

And of course it was the red ones. It’s always the red ones.

The candy itself doesn’t matter. It could be Starburst, Skittles, or any one of a million fruit snacks shaped like Hannah Barbara characters. Invariably, the red ones are always the best. It’s a universal rule; the sun rises in the east, all good things come to an end, and red Jolly Ranchers are better than blue ones. Everybody in the world feels this way. I know because I conducted a study in which I asked two people who were sitting somewhat close to me.

If all this is true, then it’s also true that purple candies are usually the worst – sad news for a color I generally like, since it’s the color of grape juice and at least one Teletubby. There’s something cloying and overpowering about a purple candy, especially its aftertaste. One or two are fine, but after that they make the taste buds recoil and pucker up tight as a snare drum.

To be fair, much of my aversion can be traced to Skittles, which became a mini-obsession in the summer of 2002. If that seems ridiculously specific, it’s only because Skittles got me through a seasonal job working for a telemarketing company, during which I cold-called people in the middle of their chicken dinners to ask if they’d mind switching long-distance carriers. (Yeah. I was one of those guys.) There’s something depressing and soul-deadening about doing a job designed for the sole purpose of bugging people. You don’t do your best work when you feel apologetic about it. I would overcome these misgivings by spending my breaks tossing back bags of Skittles, which accomplished two things: I gained ten pounds and developed an aversion to purple. Early on, I learned to eat the purples ones first and then work my way up the Skittles hierarchy, which everyone knows goes orange-yellow-green-red. Again, this is all highly scientific. I advise you to watch for my groundbreaking paper on the subject, entitled “Ravings of an Obsessive-Compulsive Sugar Addict.”

It says something about my personality (probably something unflattering) that I’m so fascinated by the propensity of red to be a candy’s top flavor. It’s not even the same flavor from brand to brand; it can denote strawberry, raspberry, watermelon, or cherry, and yet it’s always the best-for-last prize in a candy bag’s bounty. Maybe candy manufacturers recognize red as being an action color, and assign to it the taste best favored by the control groups that sample their products. Or maybe I’m going slowly insane, and this is my last rumination before snapping and swinging from a chandelier with my underwear tied around my head. This should be considered a distinct possibility.

But it’s a testament to a sugary treat’s addictive powers that I can trace the red revelation back to a singular moment that took place when I was a teenager. It certainly stuck in my head moreso than those lessons about lane-changing and parallel parking.

Which, if you see me on the road, is something you may want to keep in mind.