2023: The Mystery-Flavor Era?

A t the end of 2019 I went downtown to see my guy at the bank. I know this ages me. The very idea of having a guy, at a bank. The very idea of going to the bank.

Nowadays you do everything on your phone, but when it comes to money, I like to deal with people. I like to deposit checks in person, because you get to chat with the cashier. In the old days the bank used to have a bucket of Dum-Dum suckers. Once I pulled out a Dum-Dum that was labeled “mystery flavor,” and somehow that summed up the ancient appeal of going to the bank. Entering the great hushed hall, ascending an escalator to the tellers, listening to the whirr of the bill tabulators, the archaic sound of a check being stamped, the whole semi-holy hush of the temple of money: It all has a mystery flavor.

For some reason I researched the Dum-Dum sucker, and discovered that the mystery flavor was the result of a manufacturing process. When one batch of a particular flavor was done, they added the next flavor. There was a transitional batch that had the character of both. The mystery flavor. Keen to share this vital information, I went back a few weeks later to deposit a check. There weren’t any Dum-Dums.

“We don’t keep them out anymore,” said the teller. “Someone came by and took them all and said he was going to give them out on the light rail.”

“That’s theft,” I said. “Theft from a bank. Did anyone try to stop him?”

She shrugged. I was shocked. This was in 2019, after all, when the social order still seemed shored by timbers of yore, and the idea that someone would carry off a daring daylight Dum-Dum caper and not be tackled by a security guard — well, it was absurd. It seemed as if they were cowering in the face of anarchy.

I kid. Somewhat. You could still get a Dum-Dum if you asked, but no one did, and sometime they’d run out. Eventually they’ll stop. I always wondered if the guy really did hand them out on the light rail, or just sell them loose down on the corner.

Anyway. My guy at the bank had been there for decades. Knew everyone. When we’d take a stroll through the skyways he’d glad-hand and be glad-handed in equal measure; from managers to secretaries to café waiters, everyone knew Charlie. Once he took me to the top floor of the bank, 50 floors up in the sky, just to take in the view. Up here was where the real money had its pillow plumped. The receptionist desk? No Dum-Dums. Strictly Lindt balls.

So I went to see my guy after Christmas to get some papers sorted and signed, and afterwards I said I’d see him at his retirement shindig. Never happened. Covid shut it all down, and the swank room of personal bankers off the bank’s grand atrium wouldn’t open again for two years. Even then, it just had one guy. And he wasn’t my guy.

In the diminution year that followed, the bank tellers went away. It took months for the big banking hall to reopen, but the main-floor tellers never returned. The mezzanine area where the “personal bankers” helped with mundane tasks returned, but instead of ten bankers, there were two. In the old days you’d be met at the door and someone would offer a coffee. Have a seat! Now you felt as if you had wandered into the county morgue by mistake.

You could, of course, do that transfer online. I certainly had the skills, but when it comes to moving money from here to there, long strings of numbers are involved, and I liked dealing with anal-retentive types whose brains did not turn into buzzing beehives when confronted with critical international codes. And it was a chance to chat, meet someone you might nod to in the skyway another day. The human things that make up a city. Utterly nonessential, of course.

At the end of the year of our Lord 2022, shortly before Christmas, I went to the bank to consult a notary. The Personal Banking area was dark and empty. Perhaps it was a seasonal cutback, but it seemed more likely that this part of the operation had been trimmed as well. They’re not going to pay for the heat and lights just in case one guy shows up and needs something notarized.

It was maddening. Here was something we could not do remotely, like telemedicine. A human being has to watch me sign this paper, with my actual hand, and then the human being has to enter some lines in a book, and a human hand has to stamp the paper. There’s no way around this.

You wonder what small diminutions will happen in the year to come, and how you’ll sigh and move on, using the mental croupier stick to slide your old expectations of the world off the table. Once I went to the bank, chatted with a friend, deposited a check, and got a sucker. Okay, thanks for the story about the pilgrim days, grandpa.

Perhaps we’re still in mystery-flavor times, the transitional batch between the old world that was unraveled by the Covid reactions, and the world that reorders itself after the pandemic’s effects finally fade. But you suspect this is the flavor we’ll have for quite a while. The next flavor may have already been slipped into production, and we just don’t know it, because we’re not quite sure what it is, only that it is synthetic. And faintly sour.