The Pleasure Business

In Promo, Teddy O'Toole by Teddy O'Toole

Not all candy is the same.

Surely my sweet children understand that as well as anyone.

All of my competition in the markets know it as well.

They design their packaging to look like mine. They copy my recipes so their products taste like mine.

My competitors are a dime a dozen.

But when my candy hits the shelf, it sells out, while their products just sit and collect dust until they expire.

I once had a former competitor of mine approach me after he was forced by the numbers to close his business down.

He said, “In this cut throat marketplace, how have you managed to dominate so thoroughly in the candy business?”

I said, “That’s just it, Randy. You think I’m in the candy business. But I’m not. I’m in the pleasure business.”

That’s when the ol’ chap realized the sad truth.

He was never my competition in the first place.

The truth is, no one understands simple pleasures like the sweet children of Arcadia.

Usually, somewhere between childhood and adulthood, that understanding gets lost along the way.

Why?

Why do they lose that understanding?

Because peddlers of damaged goods convince them that there are greater pleasures than a Teddy Bear or an O’Toole bar.

They convince them that SLUTS and DRUGS are the simple pleasures in adulthood.

But nothing good be further from the truth.

Sluts, drugs, its all damaged goods.

And the sad part of it all? It makes the person who dares to try and find pleasure in such depravity the same as them.

Damaged goods.

I have a bone to pick with those damaged goods peddlers.

I have a bone to pick with you, Drexl.

You dealer of depravity. You vendor of vexed and venomous vixens.

You step out into Arcadia and proclaim to the world that you are open for business.

The Pleasure Business.

Though truly, you’re anything but, aren’t you, ol’ sport?

Me? I stand before all of Arcadia and proclaim that my treats are the sweetest, and my candies are the dandiest.

I sell pleasures of the simplest variety. The kind that, with moderation, promises not to turn my customers into damaged goods.

But you?

You stand on the corner of some Arcadian slum and proclaim your sluts are the most salacious and your drugs are the dirtiest.

And the pleasures you sell are complex. There is no moderation that can prevent your customers from becoming damaged goods.

When children buy my candies, they return to their lives after consuming them the very same as they were before.

But when adults buy your wares, soon they become your wares.

Their perfectly healthy bodies soon become drug-addled products for you to sell to other, horny drug addicts.

And the part that angers me?

You turn my customers into pleasureless scumbags.

Pleasureless scumbag damaged goods.

Just like you.

Ask yourself, Drexl. Who can really provide pleasure for Arcadians? Who can remind all those sweet children you turned into scumbags what pleasure really is?

The Candy Man can.