Ice cream truck

In 2002, the summer after my freshman year of college, it took me exactly three phone calls to secure what I thought would be the perfect summer job.  I would drive an ice cream truck throughout my somewhat rural hometown in Upstate New York: an airtight plan.

What first seemed like a good idea, and the chance to live out a childhood fantasy, quickly soured when I saw the soft underbelly of soft-serve.  From what I can tell, driving an ice cream truck is a lot like being President of the United States.  Everyone wants something from you and you are not entirely sure they won’t kill you to get it.

My first day on the job, we were going to drive the truck to the Florida Family Fun Fest.  It was one town over in Florida, NY.  My boss, Jim Jones, would ride with me as a probationary measure.  I should have known not to trust a man with the same name as a 1970’s cult leader.

I met Jim at his house the night before the Fun Fest to learn how to drive the truck.  Like a cult leader, Jim was an unconventional teacher.  His method involved sitting at his kitchen table, using a salt & pepper shaker to show me how far back I should stay from other cars.  This was ten years ago, so in case you don’t remember cars were not condiment-sized—so right away I started wondering if I’d made a huge mistake.

The ice cream truck itself was converted from an old UPS truck.  Jim had painted it a color I’ll call “whole milk white”, which looked totally creepy. The truck’s visual message said something like: “hey kids, you’re invited to the world’s most delicious cult meeting!” Jim attempted to soften this invitation by having a friend draw knockoff cartoon characters all over it.

He drew a sloppy Snoopy, a squirrelly Woodstock and, my favorite, a soft-skulled Bart Simpson with a disconcerting dent in the side of his head. Should he still be riding his skateboard? Does he need an MRI? My private questions went unanswered.

My first day began awkwardly riding with Jim to the Fun Fest. The only seat was the driver’s seat, so I drove while a squat, mustachioed man in overalls rode standing in the truck step well.  It looked a Mario Brother committing a highway robbery.  We arrived at 9:00 a.m.  Florida is a village of 2700 people—and at 9:05 a.m. they were all on line for ice cream.  The soft-serve machine broke by 10.  A group of teenage boys starting rocking the truck back and forth. It looked like a police car in a riot.

Or more accurately, it looked exactly the way you’d imagine an ice cream truck would look in a riot of 2700 people.  Children wailed and parents berated me, as I offered them rock hard Pokemon pops from the freezer.

I should take this time to mention that Jim hated people.  He warned me countless times about the ice cream biz.  According to Jim, all our customers were lowlifes.

He drowned them out with the two wooden box speakers he’d hung inside the truck, just above the windshield.  They were full-on indoor stereo speakers that were meant to be hooked up to a home entertainment system.  “Is that really safe?” I asked him once.  “Is anything really safe?”  He replied.

These speakers did double-duty, by also drowning out the ice cream truck music.  I blasted the Bangles, while the outside world was listening to one of four choices: “Mister Softee”, “Turkey in the Straw”, “The Entertainer”, and I think something by Huey Lewis and the News. I felt like a deaf Pied Piper most of the time.

After that first day at the fest, I wasn’t sure if I’d survive the summer.  The first hitchhiker I picked up jumped out of the still moving truck so I decided that it was probably not a good idea to give anymore rides. I drove my route, learning the hard way that the truck would break down if I put it in reverse for more than a minute.   The truck was pretty much Vin Diesel meets Nick Cage in that it was fast, furious and—once when I parked in the senior center parking lot without the e break—gone in 60 seconds.

At the end of each day, I plugged the generator in the truck that ran the soft serve machine back into Jim’s house to recharge.  Sidenote: before you plug a truck into a house make you cut the power to BOTH the truck and the house—unless you’re a transformer.  One day, I forgot to flip the house switch to “off” and an electric current raced through my arms like a fiery serpent.  I looked like Tom Hanks in the end of The ‘Burbs.

Things devolved over the summer, the weather was stormy and my commission dwindled.  In July, Jim hired a second driver named Jason, so I could make even less money.  50% of all profits went to purchasing more ice cream.  Next subtract $50 for gas. Then Jim and I would split the remainder 50/50.  It was a reciprocal relationship.  He got paid thrice and I got shocked by a house.

The most exciting/terrifying feature of operating the ice cream truck was the way grown men were always very eager to loudly, and insistently, give me unsolicited driving instructions.  They saw me, a teenage girl, driving a truck …and it made them kind of woozy.   How is this happening?  They asked themselves.

Aren’t I too busy being stumped by math and science and worrying about my lack of upper body strength? Then, they would regain their composure and walk into the road, usually in front of the truck, to save me from myself. Perhaps they were preventing suicide by attempting it.

One particularly hot day, I was double-teamed by two such men, as I drove down a narrow residential street in the village.  The older man stayed in his lawn chair the entire time, pumping his wiry arm and shouting indiscernible things.  Who was I to stop him?  This was obviously his passion.  Why else would his chair be so close to the road?  This was not a parade route.

In hindsight though, for him it was all a parade.  Another younger man in orange corduroy pants and no shirt stepped into the road in front of the truck vigorously waving me forward.  Whenever I think of him I always assume he had been just about to don a shirt, when he saw me driving and rushed to intervene. But don’t call him a hero.

Admittedly, cars were parked on either side of the street so it was tight, but I could still fit through without his help.  The true cause for alarm was a girthy tree branch overhanging the road and being quietly stretched as the top of the truck pushed against it.  A crowd formed, instantly.  Suddenly, my shirtless guide decided I couldn’t make it through and started walking toward the truck with his hands up demanding my retreat, revolutionary war-style.

I reversed nervously and quickly.  No longer being compressed by the front corner of the ice cream truck, the tree branch snapped and discharged like a catapult.  I was too busy watching the windshield glass splinter like a frozen pond to see the branch crack off entirely and shell the elderly man who dove from his lawn chair.  The crowd actually booed.

They all gave me way too much credit though. I could never have engineered this type of calamity—unless wishes count as premeditation.  I heard the old man’s beer can hit the side of the truck, so I fled the scene.

I realized there was only one way to escape Jim’s wrath.  However much anger he displayed, I would be angrier.  I slammed the door of the truck and seconds later flung open the door to Jim’s house.

He burst outside, seeing the truck’s spiderwebbed right windshield his face turned purple.  I commenced yelling about lowlifes.  Jim yelled and I yelled; neither of us directed our tirade at the other. It was a performance piece of free form rage.

In the end, I avoided being held accountable in any way.  I suppose Jim could have garnished my non-existed wages to pay for the windshield replacement, but that would have meant taking the truck off the road for at least one day to repair it.

I’m told the very next morning, when Jason showed up to work Jim pointed to the windshield.  He shook his head and said only two words: “f-ing Laura.”   I think that’s still the best way to explain it.

My childhood fantasy morphed into a teenage nightmare. My experience behind the wheel taught me many lessons, about life, expectations, and milk-fat. But the only one that really stuck is that I’m never going to get behind the wheel of an ice cream truck again.

Unless, for some reason Jim Jones is chasing me in a second, scarier ice cream truck and it’s my only means of escape.  Then I’ll drive; I’ll drive like the wind.