Yankee Candle Impotence

I was depressed and one Saturday got drunk enough to drive to the Yankee Candle nestled in the strip mall on Grape Road. It was right next to a restaurant that allowed customers to throw peanuts on the ground, a mundane ritual that was celebrated as some transcendent act of charity and recounted with reverence to anyone who would listen. I thought about the janitor sometimes and how they had to sweep up the spit and peanut threads and wondered how difficult it was to scoop the happiness of a town into an old dust pan that management refused to replace.  

I never really cared for candles, but when the drink tells you go somewhere you fucking go somewhere. So I guess I was going to buy a candle or worst case scenario sell my piss stained khakis to some goddamn loser at Plato’s Closet who was into that type of thing. Sometimes I’d spend hours peering into the strip mall shop windows, hoping that soon enough their windows would be boarded up like everything eventually was. 

Something about the parasitic relationship of the city and we who lived there was comforting, inconveniences to each other that coexisted against our respective will. The city, a pile of shit incapable of swatting the flies that chose it as home. Us as flies picking at the malnourished bowel movement until eventually exhausting ourselves and dying in its warm embrace. 

The drive was fine and I stayed mostly on the road, I furiously smoked a handful of cigarette filters and felt the white hairs grow a few more inches on my swollen tongue. I felt the saliva moving slowly through a jigsaw of bacteria, probing every crack on its way to a jacuzzi of bile and whiskey.

The store was as magnificent as the drink had told me. With a drywall facade like you wouldn’t believe and even some stickers on the windows advertising deals. I became mildly aroused and began to cry at the sight of the thing sitting behind a dirty mound of snow in my hometown. I don’t believe in fate, but if I did, I’d say my wholly forgettable life had brought me here for salvation, a lifeline from a city that had held my head in stagnant waters of its polluted river for decades. 

The inside was empty, save a pear shaped employee who was fondling a candle in the back, barely distinguishable to the naked eye. It smelled like a microwaved cotton candy pumpkin and I felt the scent crawl slowly down my throat with my post nasal. The smell of raw onions followed along with the perspiration of indistinguishable spit meat. 

“Welcome to Yankee Candle!” he yelled abruptly, painfully waddling over to where I stood.

“Thanks,” I replied listlessly.

“I know why you’re here today,” he said, licking a sizable dead skin chunk from his bleeding upper lip. 

Was this portly man my savior? Were his sausage fingers to fix all of my problems? He seemed oddly aware of the disrepair I existed in. Poor and lonely, eternally drunk, filled with vague regret. I began to cry again and almost hugged him, ready for the wisdom he would undoubtedly share.

“All of our candles are now fuckable,” he said pridefully, wringing his wet hands hard enough for a liquid to drip visibly onto the already soiled carpet.

I watched him pick up a hulking bastard of a candle that was scented like ground beef and spin it around to reveal a crudely carved hole at the base of it. He looked up at me gleaming, his eyes filling with the same tears as mine, his pit stains growing darker yet. I could hear his teeth grinding in the quiet shop, he looked like a proud parent at their son’s first little league game, except instead of a childhood dream it was a fuckable candle.

I didn’t ask too many questions, as a confrontation with a candle that oozed carnal urge was unexpected. I shakily extracted my wallet and paid the man for the candle in expired coupons and lugged it out to my car. He waved at me through the glass, offering a coy wink and a smile that seemed like a corporate mandate.

After a few months, every fiber in my piece of shit apartment smelled like synthetic ground beef and I fell in love with the candle. When the last piece of wax fell to my carpet, I knew I had to return to the shop and the man that had saved my life with his glory hole candle.

When I went into the shop a new employee stood smugly at the door.

“Can I help you sir?” He asked.

“I’m looking for a pear shaped bastard, very sweaty, think his name was Nick,” I replied.

“No one here by that name, can I interest you in our new hard boiled egg candle? All the egg smell none of the egg hell,”

Damnit he was really playing hardball, he was going to make me ask for the fuckable ground beef candle, make me admit how pathetic I was at a strip mall candle store, melt me into wax and reshape me into a candle that smelled like a petting zoo.

I asked him and he told me that Yankee Candle does not condone candle modifications, like he was reading out of some bullshit candle bible or PSA on the mistreatment of candles. I told him I understood and purchased a grass clippings candle to diffuse the awkwardness. He waved and winked and me just like Nick did, but this guy was no connoisseur. 

Later I sat at home drunk again, reflecting on my newly found impotence to the scent of freshly mowed grass and devising a plan for hunting down the stranger in the store that had given me a taste of that forbidden fruit. Months later, I drove by the strip mall and found the windows boarded up, this time the failure wasn’t comforting. 

The plywood suggested I would never find him again, the emptiness implied I would never fuck another candle.