Alligator Candy

by David Kushner Narrated by Bronson Pinchot

Overview

From award-winning journalist David Kushner, a regular contributor to Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and other premier magazines, Alligator Candy is a reported memoir about family, survival, and the unwavering power of love.



David Kushner grew up in the early 1970s in the Florida suburbs. It was when kids still ran free, riding bikes and disappearing into the nearby woods for hours at a time. One morning in 1973, however, everything changed. David's older brother Jon biked through the forest to the convenience store for candy, and never returned.



Every life has a defining moment, a single act that charts the course we take and determines who we become. For Kushner, it was Jon's disappearance-a tragedy that shocked his family and the community at large. Decades later, now a grown man with kids of his own, Kushner found himself unsatisfied with his own memories and decided to revisit the episode a different way: through the eyes of a reporter. His investigation brought him back to the places and people he once knew and slowly made him realize just how much his past had affected his present. After sifting through hundreds of documents and reports, conducting dozens of interviews, and poring over numerous firsthand accounts, he has produced a powerful and inspiring story of loss, perseverance, and memory. Alligator Candy is searing and unforgettable.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Eloquently told...A raw story about courage, survival and most certainly about love.”
—Tampa Bay Times

“Kushner's moving book is not only a memorial to a brother tragically deprived of his right to live; it is also a meditation on the courage necessary to live freely in a world riven by pain, suffering, and evil. A probing, poignant memoir about tragedy, grief, and trying to cope.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“[A] thoroughly reported, masterfully written memoir.”
—Booklist

“A loving and agonized examination of what Jonathan’s kidnapping and murder did to the family and...to the idea of the American childhood...[Kushner] was only 4 when his brother disappeared, and so the book is also a piece of detective work...The parents emerge as the real heroes of the book...Together, [Gilbert and Lorraine Kushner] started one of the country’s first chapters of Compassionate Friends, a support group for parents who have lost children. A story that might otherwise have been too dark to bear is instead shot with light.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Kushner’s riveting memoir, Alligator Candy, begins by asking how any parent or family can survive such unimaginable evil and devastating grief.... Parents today can understand the love, hope and fear he so eloquently describes in this account of one family’s transcendent courage in the face of crushing pain.”
—BookPage

“[A] solemn memoir....The strength of Kushner’s narrative lies in his exploration of how trauma distorts and reshapes even the strongest families....his vivid evocation of his brother, his family, and their Jewish, academic, Southern milieu is a moving tribute.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Those seeking to understand how life continues after a grave loss will love Kushner’s eloquent words and personal viewpoint.”
—School Library Journal

“Kushner’s story is uniquely, horrifyingly tragic, but his reckoning with loss and the fear of loss is universal and deeply human.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“Offers insights into how people manage to live through even such miserable experiences...a valuable story.”
—Providence Journal

“Bracingly poignant... a powerful meditation on sorrow and survival.”
—Men's Journal

“Jonathan Kushner never saw his 12th birthday but, thanks to his grieving brother, he lives on and, perhaps more significantly, represents the start of an era of not taking for granted the safety of our children.”
—Buffalo News

“Less a crime story than meditation on the shattering of middle-class innocence and the elusive comforts of memory... [Kushner] weaves an excruciating wistfulness into his book.”
—Seattle Times

“Alligator Candy is a fine piece of subjective journalism.”
—By The Book

Kirkus Reviews

2015-12-17
The story of how the author and his family dealt with the senseless murder of his older brother. In 1973, 4-year-old Kushner (Journalism/Princeton Univ.; The Bones of Marianna: A Reform School, a Terrible Secret, and a Hundred-Year Fight for Justice, 2013, etc.), a contributing editor of Rolling Stone, was living with his parents and two brothers in a Tampa suburb where children roved freely and without fear. But then, Kushner's 11-year-old brother Jon disappeared while on an errand to buy candy for his youngest brother. The family didn't learn what happened until after police investigators found his brutalized body buried in a shallow grave. In thinking about the incident as an adult, Kushner realized that he barely remembered Jon and that the details others gave him about the death "didn't stick." However, it was clear to him even as a child that both his parents and his oldest brother, Andy, understood the horror of what had happened and grieved over the loss profoundly. Eventually, the family settled into an outwardly new, but inwardly damaged, normal while Kushner and Andy acclimated themselves to being two brothers instead of three. Yet the author and his family never forgot Jon, who haunted them all. More than 20 years after Jon's murder, the family discovered that one of the men convicted of killing Jon was scheduled for a parole hearing. Kushner began an in-depth investigation of Jon's murder, episodes of which he would not be able to piece together in narrative form after his father's death in 2010. Much as the author desired closure, he realized it was a fantasy; what he sought instead was to understand how the grief he and his family suffered was "present and evolving" and how it had shaped them into the people they became. Kushner's moving book is not only a memorial to a brother tragically deprived of his right to live; it is also a meditation on the courage necessary to live freely in a world riven by pain, suffering, and evil. A probing, poignant memoir about tragedy, grief, and trying to cope.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172070884
Publisher:	Novel Audio
Publication date:	08/09/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Alligator Candy
MY LAST MEMORY of my brother Jon was my most suspect. It was October 28, 1973, and we were on the sidewalk outside our house. I was a stocky four-year-old with a brown bowl haircut, and Jon, wiry and lean with wavy red hair, was eleven. Earlier that year, we’d moved to this small ranch house with a red Spanish-style roof in Tampa, Florida. It was the northern edge of the burgeoning suburbs, a new home on the newest street by the woods. For the kids in the neighborhood, the woods represented the great unknown, a thicket of freedom, a mossy maze of cypress and palms begging to be explored. Kids ventured into there on horseback, barefoot, on bikes. They had worn a path to the 7-Eleven convenience store across the woods, and that’s where Jon was heading this day.

Jon straddled his red bicycle, aiming for the trees. These were the Easy Rider years, and boys’ bikes were designed to resemble motorcycles, the kinds we’d see driven around town by Hells Angels. Jon’s bike had a long red banana-shaped seat, shiny chrome upright handlebars, and fat tires. For added effect, kids would tape a playing card in the back spokes to sound like a motorcycle when the tire spun. They’d lower their heads, extend their arms, and hunch their backs as they pedaled, visions of Evel Knievel in their minds.

My parents had given Jon a green ten-speed Schwinn for his birthday in September, but for some reason he decided to ride his old one this morning. Maybe he wanted something more rugged for the woods or just wanted to take one more spin on his old bike before retiring it. He wore a brown muscle shirt and cutoff blue jean shorts embroidered with a patch from his day camp, Camp Keystone. His sneakers were red, white, and blue Hush Puppies. I could tell by the way his feet bobbed on the pedals that he was anxious to leave.

“You’re going to forget,” I told him.

“I’m not,” he replied.

“I know you are.”

“I won’t.”

“Let me go with you.”

“You can’t. You’re too young.”

I wanted something specific from the store: Snappy Gator Gum. It wasn’t just gum, it was a toy. The gum came packed in the mouth of a plastic alligator head that opened and closed when you squeezed the neck. I had to have it and didn’t want anything to get in the way.

“What if it rains?” I asked Jon. I was thinking about an afternoon at our last house, when Jon had biked to a store shortly before a torrential Florida downpour. I remembered standing next to my mom in the kitchen when Jon called, and my mom telling me that we had to go pick him up in the station wagon because he was, as she said, “caught in the rain.” I hadn’t heard that phrase before, and it struck me as strange. I pictured Jon literally caught in the rain, stuck in suspended animation, hovering in a cage of falling drops.

“If it rains I’ll call,” he promised.

“Call me anyway when you get there,” I said, “so I can remind you what I want.”

“Fine.”

Jon grabbed the handlebars and pedaled quickly down the sidewalk toward the woods. I watched him ride off, still wishing I could go along. I never saw him again. It would take decades to unravel what happened. But my search would always lead me back to this spot.

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