Summer is finally here, bringing with
it that characteristic sound, the sound that, more than
any other, defines summertime existence for city dwellers.
Is it the pleasant chirping of birds in the gently rustling
leaves of the lush, green trees? Is it the clickety-clack
on the pavement of the claws of the friendly possum?
Is it the melodious shrieks of your dysfunctional neighbors'
domestic disputes, wafting gently on the breeze through
their recently opened windows? No, no, my friends; the
sound of summer is a jaunty little air penned by ragtime
great Scott Joplin nigh on a century ago. It's "The
Entertainer," and it blares from a thousand tinny loudspeakers
wherever children congregate, signaling that their old
pal the ice cream man is on his way.
A few years ago, that old pal was me.
As they say, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The want ad said merely "Fun in the Sun" and promised
"Daily pay - No Experience Necessary!" Now,
of course, I know that any job classified promising
anything more pleasant than "Grim Wage Slavery--No Future"
is to be regarded with suspicion, but at the time I
was more naive. Moreover, the proverbial wolf, perennially
in or about the vestibule, was at the time not merely
at, or even through, the door, but more or less propping
his feet up on my kitchen table and making noises about
my getting him his own key. So when I answered the ad
and found out what the job entailed, I didn't recoil
in horror, as I probably ought to have done. Instead,
I signed up.
Let me tell you something about the ice
cream business-- it's a huge scam. It's structurally
identical to the crack trade, as far as I can tell,
except it's legal. This is how it works: Some smart
johnny with a little extra cash goes out and picks up
five or so of those weird little Cushman trucks like
the ones golf-course groundskeepers drive. He paints
them white, mounts some coolers on them, and gets a
connection with the sort of ice-cream-novelty wholesaler
who traffics in lumps of green ice in the shape of a
turtle's head. Because these are made out of nothing
but water and toxic waste, he can buy them for something
like four dollars the long ton.
Then he goes and builds a stable of street-level
dealers (me), who buy the product for about three times
what he paid for it. (The überdealer fronts the
product; the street dealers pay him at the end of each
day, and he buys back the unsold portion, if any.) He
assigns each dealer a piece of turf. The dealer then,
at great personal risk (at least one driver from a rival
gang was killed during my brief tenure on this job)
goes out and pushes the product on schoolkids, who,
like drug addicts, have zero sales resistance to the
product-- the only limit to the amount they'll buy is
the amount of money they can beg, borrow, or steal.
The street dealer takes a cut of the incredibly marked-up
street value, but that value is set by his boss/connection.
The whole thing is very capitalistic and exploitative
as all hell, and the driver is free to muse upon the
injustice of it all as he purveys his wares to the slavering
pre-teen market.
The omnipresent fact of an ice cream
driver's life is, without a doubt, the music. This issues
from a nasty little metal box on the dashboard that
has four settings, corresponding to the four songs that
will provide the sound track for the day. "Pop Goes
the Weasel" is pretty much out of the question; building
as it does to its absurd little climax every nine seconds
or so, it's the sonic equivalent of Chinese water torture.
"Turkey in the Straw" is OK for a while, but pretty
soon it starts to make you feel like you're on Hee
Haw, and its campy cornpone appeal pales quickly.
The third selection is a simple two-tone progression, the "dee-dum" that big trucks are required to make when they're backing up. For a while, this one seemed to have promise as a sort of electronic mantra, and I managed to amuse myself by pretending it was the new Philip Glass record, but this wore thin after a while. There's no way around it: You're stuck with "The Entertainer."
The music is with you always. You can't turn it off. You can't even turn it down, because you need to give the kids in the next block sufficient lead time to somehow acquire the fistfuls of grubby change you're about to fleece off them. This can take a while; you basically need to give them about two minutes, the length of time it takes an 8-year-old who's holding his breath to turn blue. The music blasts its way through your skull at top volume eight hours a day, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Strangely, it's not as bad as it sounds. Even though, as a civilian, the music of a passing vendor would produce in me the sort of autonomic cringing response one normally associates with spinal taps and chewing tinfoil, after only an hour or so the music stopped bothering me, and it never did again. It's as though the receptors in the driver's brain that process "The Entertainer" just get burned out-- you don't even know it's there.
The other distressing reality the driver
has to contend with is the never-ending cavalcade of
children. God knows, I've never been the world's biggest
fan of these little hellions (during my tenure on this
job, a friend took to calling me "the ill-humor man"),
but it's hard to imagine a scenario in which you could
see the youth of America in a worse light. People have
this idea that children are born into the world innocent,
trusting souls, full of charity and the milk of human
kindness, and that society corrupts them as they grow
into adulthood. In actual fact, precisely the reverse
is true: Children are born perfect little greed machines,
free of any decency whatsoever. They have all the moral
feeling of a jackal at a fresh kill, and their single-minded
pursuit of the pleasure principle, at any cost, is doubtless
the envy of sharks worldwide. It takes two decades of
constant social bombardment to hammer these murderous
little demons into whatever is passing for a human being
these days in this vale of tears.
Unfortunately for the ice-cream man,
that socialization has either not taken hold, or is
brushed aside, when the mob descends. Oh, in twos or
threes they're all right. God knows, one gets tired
of being asked "What do you have that's free?" (answer:
"shut up, you worthless little fuck") but
small groups are manageable. It's when they descend
in scores, as full-throttle Lord of the Flies
mob psychology kicks in, that you have to be careful.
They try to break into the cooler. They try to break
into the cooler. They try to steal your money and cigarettes.
They steal each other's money. On at least one occasion
they started shaking the whole truck as if to turn it
over, so that the whole scene resembled those labor
demonstrations of the 1930s in which cars tried to cross
a well-manned picket line.
Sometimes it's best just to hop in the truck and bolt, although
there appear to be few stronger drives in nature than
the drive of a child to hurl himself under the wheels
of an ice cream truck. (The driver is, of course, legally
liable for any tramplings, stab wounds, or other mishaps
that his presence may incite.)
Still, it's precisely the deep and abiding appetite of the kids
that makes the whole thing such a sweet scam for the
operator. Daily cash that comes in pretty much under
the table is hard to beat, though if I were a parent
I might want to consider exactly what type of person
needs about 60 dollars in cash every day. Perhaps the
most telling, if embarrassing, recommendation of this
job is that I went back and applied for it again a few
summers later. They never called me back. Bastards.
Marty Smith is the Editor of
Lime Tea and a bum, not necessarily in that order.
He lives in Portland, OR.
