PAUL PUGH’S LITTLE slice of hell was an unlikely one. Why? Because any nine-to-fiver slaving away within a square cubicle, inside an airless, windowless office building, would have killed for the chance, like him, of running their own business less than two hundred feet from a sandy beach and the salty sea.
As for Paul, he felt he might just as well have been on Devil’s Island. Out of earshot from the sounds of waves breaking, he was, with a knot in his gut, consumed with finding a way to keep his boardwalk cotton candy shop afloat and his family in one piece.
It was September 1990 and still hours before he’d be unlocking the front door at Pugh’s Cotton Candy—The Fluff of Dreams—in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Not that it mattered precisely when he opened on this dreary first Wednesday after Labour Day. The boardwalk was desolate, as was the beach. Summer vacation was officially over and kids would be shortly heading back to school, unless, of course, they could convince their mothers that they’d contracted some horrible, contagious disease overnight.
Paul pushed back the center of his thick, black eyeglass frames from the tip of his prodigious nose, back to his forehead, only to have them instantly slide down halfway. In doing so, he managed to deposit a wisp on them from his most recent culinary experiment: bacon-and-egg-flavoured cotton candy.
“Not the right balance, too much egg, not enough bacon,” he groused. “One more try, this one’s going to be perfect.”
Using a frayed towel, Paul wiped down the interior of the metal bowl from which the confection would be collected onto a paper cone. Next, he opened containers of sugar, powdered egg, and bacon bits he’d previously reduced to dust in a food processor. Not the scientific type, he eyeballed the amount of each ingredient he added to the small, warm receptacle at the bowl’s center until his innate sense of what was sufficient was satisfied.
Paul set aside the containers, tugged the bottom of his soiled T-shirt over his twenty-eight-year-old protruding belly and drew close to the rusted contraption.
“Moment of truth,” he whispered. His index finger grazed the on switch, then hesitated and shook without engaging it.
At that moment, a plump, golden tabby with a peppering of small reddish spots on its coat, leaped onto the counter, startling Paul. Curious, it peered inside the cotton candy machine and then licked Paul’s extended finger, as if encouraging him to get on with his experiment.
“Hello there, Measles,” said Paul, catching his breath. The cat looked up at Paul, then stuck out its paw and made contact with the same finger.
“You seem to be more optimistic about this creation than me. Well, here goes nothing.” He flicked the switch and stepped back.
Silence.
“Damn switch.”
Two more tries and the motor sputtered to life. Paul grabbed a cone, and impatiently waited for the first strands to magically materialize and quickly become a tornado of spinning sugar crystals.
“C’mon, c’mon.” Paul tapped the side of his glasses with the cone’s wide end, then bowed at the waist for a closer look.
Measles, the more patient of the two, passed the time with a brisk scratch behind her right ear.
“Finally!” shouted Paul, surprising himself. He dug into the collecting bowl and began swirling his hand around its circumference.
“Shit!” Paul noticed that in his excitement, he’d inserted the cone’s pointed end in first. He flipped it, continued on for a full minute, and then turned off the machine. He proudly raised the lopsided finished product high, as if it were an Olympic torch. A wide grin spread across his flushed face. “Magnificent! Bacon-and-egg-flavoured cotton candy. I smell sweet and savoury success!”
Measles approached, stood on her hind legs and nibbled on the thick coating of candy floss that cocooned Paul’s arm.
“What do you think, Measles? Is that a million-dollar idea, or what?”
The indifferent cat leapt onto the floor and headed for the shop’s cool, dark corner, where she curled up into a ball and licked her teeth.
Paul saw her disappear into the shadows. “Not impressed, huh? Okay. I’ll go upstairs and see what Diane has to say. She’s never at a loss for words.”
