Cold as Ice

By MK Reed

         This is the story of the second best job I ever had. The best job I ever had is the one I have now, where I get paid to rewind, run, and then watch movies, and sometimes splice or desplice them before or after the show. But that job is easy. This is about the best hard job I've ever had.

         Last summer I needed work but couldn't find it. I looked for a month, but nothing at the shore seemed to need doing. Employers didn't want college kids because they leave before the end of the summer, or didn't want me because I didn't look the part of the cute hostess or cheerful waitress. So for a good month I hung around my friend Morgan's house and scoured the classifieds looking for something that paid as well as telemarketing but didn't involve as much soul stripping.

         Then one day in early June, as we walked back from the beach, fate circled around the block and called us with its siren song. Morgan shrieked the words she and many others have Pavlovian-ly responded with for over twenty years, "IT'S WEASER! WAAAAAIIIT!!!"   Morgan sprinted down and around the block after the Italian ice truck, and I returned to her porch. She returned minutes later, her tongue already stained blue from her Italian ice, and informed me she had discovered the career of a lifetime. "I'm going to be a Weaser driver!"

         The idea of driving a truck down street after street after street was unappealing at the beginning of June, but by the middle of the month the idea of being able to pay my rent lured me to Weaserville, home of the head office and truck yard of Weaser's Italian Ices dozen truck fleet. I was introduced to Bruce, the boss, and hired after he reviewed my driving record, which was miraculously clean. Bruce looked kind of like Stone Cold Steve Austin of WWE fame, and you could hear every drink and cigarette he'd ever had in his voice. He told me to show up a few days later to learn the route and how to do the job. I'd be taught by Don, the kid hired a month before me who was currently doing the route. I'd be paid on a sliding commission basis, twenty percent of two hundred dollars, twenty-two percent of two hundred fifty dollars, and twenty five percent of anything over three hundred dollars a day. I went home and waited to begin my new career as an Italian Ice truck driver.

          I was assigned to truck ten and given a license to sell cupfuls of flavored ice shavings to the citizens of Neptune, Ocean Grove, Bradley Beach, Wall, and West Belmar. Morgan was given truck nine, the town of Ocean.   As truck neighbors, we spent mornings cleaning and stocking our trucks together, while at the same time competing with each other to see who could finish all the tasks first. Each day when I got on the truck I had to check the freezer to see what was left and what flavors I needed to get for the new day. For an entire day on the road, I would need about ten tubs of ice from which to scoop, and a reserve of eight for when the top tubs ran out. The freezer was a little over three feet high, with rounded edges so that you can lean inside it with a paint scrapper and chip away the mountain of fallen ice shavings Don dropped on the freezer floor the day before, then pry the last tub of Cherry ice off the freezer bottom. The freezer was white with chrome trim and somehow absorbed every sun ray that came into the vicinity of the truck, so that whatever exposed area of my legs came in contact with the freezer I got a pleasant little sunshine burn. Then after listing the necessary flavors for the day, I would wait in line with the other truck drivers for Bruce to load up my shopping cart with five gallon tubs of ice, and haul them back to truck Ten. The unopened tubs went in the bottom of the freezer, then the open tubs would be stacked on top. After waiting in line to hose the syrup and residue off my arms and the floor of the truck, it was time to get gas.

         For the first few weeks of the summer, getting gas was the worst part of the day. Bruce had set up an account at the nearest gas station, over the hill in the opposite direction from my route. Don warned me on my first day: "These guys are assholes." The next day getting gas by myself, I found out he was right. The creepy attendant waited until all the other cars were gone to fill up my truck, as he did for all the Weaser trucks, but when I left the attendant offered up a "Bye-bye, bay-bee," in the sleaziest tone I'd yet heard. I would soon hear much sleazier.

         On alternating days off, Morgan and I gathered information on the other drivers on our routes. My first day without Morgan I met Annika, who was to become the bane of our Weaser existence. Annika was at best a poseur, at worst the black sheep of Weaser. She was consistently the low truck even when given route gems like Pop Warner football practices and city pools. You could always feel better about your own low days in comparison to her. She consistently came to work in clothes that would be fitting anywhere but on an ice cream truck. Italian Ice is frozen goo, and at the end of the day you are sticky and multicolored. The truck is made of metal and thus is hot; the freezer takes energy to run all day, and its motor heats the truck's insides more than the heat of the summer sun ever does. The ideal uniform would have no sleeves, no pant legs past the knee, and would probably consist of mesh. Tight pants and skirts are not meant to contain active, sweaty people, and are not known for their comfort, although they are said to work wonders for tips. To add insult to injury, Annika considered herself a punk, in that she owned an obviously new Ramones shirt and listened to loud, crappy bands on her truck's stereo. Her music collection seemed to be pieced together from the merchandise tables at the back of local punk shows, bought for the opportunity to chat up the opening band's cute lead singer, who was inevitably full of artistic torment and Mountain Dew.   She had clearly never lived with real punks, who have terrible skin and hygiene, who create tightness from clothes not meant to hold back flesh, and who never buy shirts or pants that look like they cost more than five dollars. Annika was a mall bred pseudo-punk poseur, and clearly incompetent. It wasn't long before the entire crew was making fun of her behind her back, and in the end, even Bruce joined our mockery.

         My Weaser counterpart was not the bumbling doofus Annika was.   Don was a tall skinny blond kid with a round face and pre-pubescent scraggly beard, who never said much, but who brought in more money than I did every day. The only thing he did wrong in Bruce's eyes was that he left the truck a mess, which was left for me to clean. While I didn't actually hate Don, as that would have required that I'd recognized that he had a personality, I became increasingly bitter about sharing the truck with him. There were mountains of ice shavings frozen to the bottom of the freezer for me to pick up every night. I had no idea how Don squeezed four hundred dollars out of the ghetto every day, when I made most of my money on the beach.   Every night I would return to Bruce's comments of how Don made fifty or so dollars more than me the night before, and all I could do was gripe about not knowing Don's secret money methods. Don was the perfect Weaser employee. Don was a Wonder Boy.

         There were three Wonder Boys at Weaser: Don, Scott, and Santo. All of them seemed to have a golden touch; the rest of us hardly ever brought in more money than they did.   Half of their skill was that they received the best routes- Asbury Park, Keensburg, and my route, Neptune. The other half was something only they understand. There are certain advantages to being male in the ice trade. For one, no one will ever confuse your gender. The opposite will never be true, because Ice Cream Man is the one profession that will never reach the PC gender-neutral name reorganization. Ice Cream Man. It just rolls off the tongue. Despite the fact that I don't sell ice cream and am not a man, it's what I was most often called. "Sir" was the runner up. Actually, if you only count the ways in which I was addressed face to face, Sir was the leader. I wish I could say this was because I look androgynous or had short hair, but discussions with the other Weaser ladies have proved that this is not true. Morgan has hair down to her ass, Janet has a lengthy ponytail and has done her route in the same town for eight years, and Annika wore dresses, and we all were called Sir on a daily basis. At least we can forgive the children. They're so out of their minds in anticipation of sugar that they can hardly keep out of the path of the truck. They also tend to apologize when they realize they're wrong. And there are people who just don't expect to see girls doing that kind of labor. They realize their mistake and apologize. But there are those who don't realize and don't care that the twenty one year old they've just asked to give them a jumbo rainbow has sizable breasts. They don't realize that the "boy" they're handing their money to is wearing a low cut tank top and a bra, or a bikini top and hot pants. Apparently that's not odd to them. Not only that, but when I left Weaser to go back to college, Morgan took over my route, and few people noticed that I had left. Don was the "guy," so I was "the girl," and when Morgan took over, she magically transformed into me, because she was also a girl. It never happens in the poor neighborhoods because there all the guys hit on every girl in site. It's only the tourists and the rich suburbanites that never realize their mistakes. So I wonder how little attention they pay to other people, if this sort of behavior is used frequently with friends and family, or if it's just for the people there to serve them.   Neither answer is comforting.

         The other main advantage to being a male Icee scooper is that you don't have to build up any wrist muscles when you first start out. Most teenage and post-teenage males are accustomed to the repetitive back and forth hand motions due to years of masturbation. Women generally don't have nearly enough practice, and most who do are already practicing those skills in more lucrative career paths.

         Here is the dialog every female mobile frozen desert employee recites during the course of an average day:

It's a dollar.

No, you can't have a free one.

Happy Birthday. No, you can't have a free one.

No, I don't have spoons.

No, I don't have napkins.

No, I don't hear the music in my sleep (anymore).

Yes/No, I do/don't have drugs/guns.

It's actually incredibly hot in the truck unless I climb into the freezer, and that tends to melt the ice.

Yes, I'm really in college.

No, I don't eat that much ice.

Yes, I do have the phattest, most pimped out ride in town.

He'll be on this route tomorrow.

Get off the truck!

Let go of the truck!

Get off the roof of the truck!

Please hurry.

*Ahem.* Miss.

Yes, I have a boyfriend.

No, you can't have my number.

No, I have to get going.

No, I will not fuck you in the truck.

No, have you ever fucked a white girl?

I'll call the cops.

Give it back, or I'll call the cops.

Yeah, I'm married.

Yeah, I got kids.

I got a lot of em.  

All the flavors are good.

Only the last few of these are lies.

         There are a wide variety of flavors of ice, all of them can be broken into three categories: the standards, the alternators, and the rare. The standard flavors are the types that are always in the freezer, the most popular flavors: Cherry, Lemon, Sky Blue, Green Apple, Chocolate, and Watermelon or Bubblegum.   Watermelon and Bubblegum alternate between each other but one of each should be in the freezer. Bubblegum is only popular with kids, Watermelon is popular with everyone; but no one is as enthusiastic about Watermelon as Bubblegum, and the enthusiasm for both is directly proportionate to the sugar contained in each. Cherry is the default flavor of Italian Ice, both sweet and cold, and adults favor Lemon because many remember Lemon Ices from their own childhood, and because there's little sugar in it. Green Apple is a very tart flavor, and appeals to a certain type who are daring enough to get past the neon color for the taste. Chocolate appeals to the true chocolate lovers, who overcome their initial reluctance to chocolate ice and relish the uniqueness of non-ice cream textured cocoa. Sky Blue is for kids who love to stain their tongues unnatural colors and sugar junkies. The alternators depended a little on what was in stock and a little on the preferences of the truck drivers. Mango was a staple on truck Ten because it sold well in all the neighborhoods and it was my own favorite fruit and flavor.   It alternated with Pina Colada because whenever I had Mango people asked for Pina Colada, and vice versa. Raspberry was also popular because it was unassuming and mild, but still sweet. Banana was an unnatural shade of yellow, but went well with Chocolate, and sold well in the ghetto. Then there were the rare flavors, like Iced Tea, and Coconut, that didn't get made too often by the distributor, but had die-hard fans in the streets. After one kid kept asking me for a week straight for Iced Tea, I finally got it on the truck. It sat there for a week, and only went that fast because it went into all the Rainbows. A Rainbow is the most annoying Icee to make, because it requires you to go into each tub of ice and scrap out a decent amount of each flavor. Rainbows are the worst in the morning when the ice is at its hardest and rainbows take the longest to make. Who likes Rainbows? Children who can't make choices, and oddly enough, big biker type dudes.   The general scenario of a Rainbow order goes something like the following:

         Mom and Kid are at the window looking at the dry erase board with the day's flavors and a little sketch I draw to remind myself I have dignity and talent and will probably not be doing this forever. Mom reads off the flavors to her illiterate or short child:

          "There's Cherry, Lemon, Bubblegum-"

         "OOH! I WANT BUBBLEGUM!"

         "Wait 'til I'm done, Honey. Green Apple, Sky Blue-"

         "OOH! I WANT SKY BLUE!"

         "Chocolate, Mango, Raspberry, Banana, oh, and RAINBOW!"

         "OOOOH! I WANT A RAINBOW!"

         "One small rainbow please! The dollar one."

         This conversation lasts about a minute, and it happens at least half the time you wait on people. A three hundred dollar day means this happened a hundred and fifty times, so at a hundred and fifty minutes, you've just spent two and a half hours of your day listening to this conversation over and over. If you work four days a week, that's ten hours, or one entire day on the road, not including time in the yard prepping the truck. If you work for sixteen weeks over the summer, you spend the entirety of four of those weeks listening to this conversation. I hate Rainbows.

         The only thing worse than Rainbows are not-quite rainbow. The kids who want everything except for chocolate, and banana, but list everything they do want. "I want... Cherry... Lemon... Sky Blue... Green Apple... Watermelon... Pina Colada... and... Raspberry." To simplify this, it's easier to ask what they don't want, but after saying "Which one don't you want?" forty times in an hour, you tend to stop and just try and remember. Of course, since you've already made forty semi-rainbows this hour, there's no way you'll keep it straight, so by the fifth flavor, you have to repeat what you've put in first, make sure you're getting it correct. The kid will repeat the last few to you in the sort of tone that suggests you're an imbecile for not remembering something so simple over the course of thirty seconds. You silently pray to God that this kid will end up in a job worse than this one.

          Consequently, the best time for selling Italian Ice is Independence day Weekend, because the special of the week can be a Red, White & Blue. You get to seem patriotic and save time on multi-flavored Icee.   Parents get so excited about being pro-American, and kids get the thrill of three different kinds of sugary goodness.   It rolls off the tongue and I can get on to the next guy before they remember that they really wanted something with Apple and Bubblegum.  

         One of the most prominent features of the Jersey Shore is Wa-Wa.   Wa-Wa is a chain of convenience stores, some of which offer the best priced gas in the county. They are ubiquitous at the shore and on the shore highways. One was located on the highway going to the Weaser HQ; another was located on the highway going to and from my route. This made for plenty of opportunities to stop at Wa-Wa.   A breakfast of buttered poppy seed rolls could be picked up quickly and cheaply on the way to work, or a day's drink supply could be picked up in one stop and kept cold in the truck freezer on the way to the route. They were the sole providers of "Ghetto Juice," a lemonade so sugary it could fuel you through even the longest days, and free of anything more natural than high fructose corn syrup. A half-gallon of Ghetto Juice cost less than two dollars and lasted most of the day.   If it seemed exceptionally hot, a full gallon of water was even cheaper. Wa-Wa was usually the only part of my day where I wasn't indentured to some asshole. There, I was the asshole, and they were under an obligation to sell me my Ghetto Juice. I could take a few minutes and listen to the people working there talk among themselves.

         Wa-Wa was where I realized what a different world I lived in. The two black ladies working behind the counter were discussing their kids. One said the following: "I was twenty-five when I had my son, and people were always asking me, 'You waiting for Prince Charming or something?'"   The tone of her voice suggested that twenty-five was ancient, almost past the age of child bearing. I grew up in a wealthy suburban town where twenty-five was akin to teen pregnancy.   Almost every kid in my grade went to college, everyone graduated, and the only teen parent was a guy whose own parents could more than afford to raise his kid for him. Girls in my school went to Ivy League colleges to become lawyers and doctors, or at the very least to one of the former Seven Sisters for Ph. D.s.   During my entire high school career, only one person dropped out of high school, and she was supported by her mother, a lawyer. We were encouraged to develop our minds and talents.   Pregnancy was not an option for us until we were approaching thirty, when we had good careers and were happily married.

      Everyone always asks about the music. Weaser's trademark song was actually an uncopyrighted ten-second bastardization of the Tarantella. It repeated every eighteen seconds, unless the delay was turned up, but it was so unrecognizable that unless we asked Bruce, we never would have known. There's a little button inside the truck that turns the PA on and off, and a knob to turn up the volume. The first night when I came home, I heard the song as I was drifting to sleep, and I knew I was in for a rough summer. Surprisingly, that turned out to be the only time it stayed stuck in my head.   My brain quickly learned to tune out the chimes, and I began to regard them as a counter- that's eighteen more seconds of the route over and done with... and that's another.   Kids would come out, spin in a circle with their pointer fingers in the air, and sing along to the tune: "Doot doot doot doot doodilly doodilly, doot doot doot doot doodilly doo." Every parent that accompanied their kid to the curb would comment, "I bet you hear that in your sleep." I'd laugh, and say it didn't bother me that much. And it didn't, because that music was what got people to leave their homes and give me money. The louder it was, and the more often it played, the more people came out. I rarely turned down the music, and I never used the dela

         On part of my route I got to park at the Ocean Grove beach for a few hours, but because of local laws I had to turn off the music. Unfortunately, that meant that I had to rely on the merit of the parking space to get customers. If I was stuck behind some shrubs or the pavilion, it was going to be a rough day. I could try and make a little noise when I first pulled into the space by backing up and straightening out the truck, which was equipped with the same reverse alert tractor trailers utilize. On top of that, the laws mandate that if a vendor does not have at least one customer every five minutes, they must move to a new parking spot. These laws were enforced with an iron first by Herb, a retired teacher who took his job very seriously. Herb would monitor our business, laying in wait and quizzing us on when our last customer had bought a snack. Parking spots at the beach can be rare, and may take over an hour to find. No one wanted to move.   We all knew how vital the music was to staying competitive, and we had all kinds of competition.

         Weaser was unique because it didn't fall into the Good Humor trap. Our trucks had no prepackaged items, so we could carry far more, and made the most profit from our sales. Of course, if the kid on the corner of McCabe wants a Chipwich, you're screwed, because not only is he not going to buy from you, he's going to stop you and get you over to the window before he realizes you're not the ice cream man, and you're going to hate his guts and hope the Good Humor guy runs him over so he won't get that dollar either. We hated the ice cream man, and they were all over our towns. The worst was when they were in the area at the same time. We would either end up behind them shaking our fists in rage, or in front of them going as slow as possible and taking up as much of the road as we could so they couldn't get around until we got flagged down by some kid and they got ahead of us. We went to ridiculous lengths to outsell the ice cream guys, and were so incredibly petty we actually referred to them as the Bad Humor men, taking great pride in the stupidity of the insult.

         Even worse than the ice cream guys were Little Jimmy and Little Shel, the only other mobile Italian Ice sellers in the area. Jimmy and Shel were the far more ghetto version of Weaser, who sold their ices in Asbury Park and Neptune.   The hood residents mostly conceded that Weaser was the better Icee, and were pretty loyal to us.   This enraged Shel and Jimmy, who were both black and seemed to feel that spoiled white kids were on turf that should rightfully belong to them. The worst insult to them was that part of my route went by Shel's house, and I usually made it past that part of the route before he was out.   One day he pulled out of his driveway right before I got to his block, and sped down the street. I kept going the same speed I had been, and his tune quickly faded out of earshot. A few days later as I passed by his house, I heard a loud crash behind me. Shel had thrown a rock at me, but it had only hit the side of the truck so I kept going. Everyone at Weaser who shares their route with Jimmy or Shel has a story where they threatened to call the cops, or did call the cops, or threw something at us.  

         Areas like Asbury Park, Neptune City, Long Branch, and Keensburg were rough, and Bruce generally didn't put women on those routes. Neptune was only part of my route in the afternoon, and it wasn't as bad as other areas, so it was never a big deal. But upon finding out that Scott could bring $600 out of Asbury Park, Morgan made it her mission to get that route. After much pestering, Bruce agreed to teach her the route, and Morgan spent a day on the truck with him learning where to go.   But Bruce spent the day telling her all the horror stories of Asbury, and detailing everything that ever went wrong in the entire history of Weaser on the route. The night before Morgan was supposed to do the route alone, she was in a panic. Convinced she was going to take a wrong turn and end up getting mugged and killed, she brought the route list home with her at night. We made dinner, and she made the decision for both of us to drive around Asbury at two in the morning, as she needed a navigator to read off the turns.   She would tell me Bruce's comments as we drove down the avenues, including his advice not to drive down the starred streets at night.   Let it never be said that I am an unfaithful friend, for I have driven down a street nicknamed "Dealer Alley" at three A.M., missed the turn, and circled back around the block again to find the right path. When Morgan told Bruce about our field trip the next day, he replied, "What would you have said to the cops if they pulled you over on Washington Street at two in the morning? What possible reason would two white girls in an SUV have in Asbury after midnight?"

         Morgan replied, "I would have told them I was trying to learn my ice cream route and showed them the print out of all the directions with the syrup stains on it." Bruce laughed and dropped the subject.

         Most of the towns I covered were working or lower class areas, where the parents were only around during the evening. Most of the routes focused on the more urban areas, because in upper class homes, parents keep ice cream in the house all the time, and the kids tend to stick inside where the air conditioning will keep them cool. Plus, the houses are spaced out much more, so you have to drive two or three times as long to make a comparable amount of money.   In poorer neighborhoods, kids hang out in front yards where the breezes can keep them cool. They scrounge up whatever loose change they can find to make up a dollar. They ask for free ones and don't pester you too much when you say no- they've heard it all before many, many times. They are used to hearing no. Kids in the suburbs ask for free ones when they're already eating ice cream from inside the house, and when you tell them no, they try and convince you that their dad is the president of the company. (For the record, Bruce has no kids, and only just got married in October.) The only thing more obnoxious than these kids asking for free ones was when their parents asked for free ones. In the ghetto, when you stop at one house, you generally have to serve half a dozen kids, because along with the kid who comes out to stop the truck are his sisters, brothers, and cousins. You'll wait for him while he runs back in the house to get the money from his mom, but she'll usually have it for him, and will be glad that you can offer the kids a little break from the heat for a dollar a head. When they get older, they'll still try and get a free one off you, but instead of taking no as an answer, they take your tip cup, or on rare occasions, your car keys.

         The working class neighborhoods, where there's a truck in every other driveway, and half of those have the name and phone number of the name of the construction company on the sides are the best places to sell ice. Many of these homes tend to have pools, so kids stay in the backyard, but they can hear the bells there. They can afford the seventy-five extra cents for a large and parents are willing to let their kids do so. They are nice to you, and polite, and they smile back at you. The kids might be jerks occasionally, but their parents will yell at them about what they do if they see it or you tell them about it.   Moms wearing their grown son's old basketball shorts order a small Icee for themselves, and parents and kids come out to do something together as a family, if only for a few minutes that night. They make small conversation with you while you scoop, ask questions about what it's like to work for Weaser, and are genuinely happy to talk to you while you pass through the neighborhood. Parents ask if you're in college, and where you go, and they seem glad to know you're working your way through school and have some ambition in life. They'll throw a whole dollar in the tip jar if they get change from a five, and they make a point of saying, "This is for the College Fund."

         The second best places to go, if you're female, are to the car dealerships and auto body shops, where the mechanics make it known that they'd like to get under your hood. They always run out to get something to cool off, they come out in groups, they have their own money, and they'll usually buy a bigger Icee than kids. They comment when their server's thong sticks above their pants as they bend over the cooler, and always smile at you. They always tip girls well.

         The rich neighborhoods are the absolute worst. Kids are rude and unruly, and parents make no attempt to correct this problem. They come out and buy one small Icee, act like jerks, and don't tip, even when they pay with a twenty and get nineteen singles in change.   They expect quick service, they complain the most about what to get, and they make the most complicated orders because they want everything personalized. And let me emphasize this: they don't tip.

         A lot of the time the rich people are the customers at the beach. They're the second worst, because at least at the beach you don't have to keep driving to make money.   They complain that you don't have Snapple, because every civilized retailer in America sells Snapple. My first job at the shore was in an independent coffee shop in the same town where I parked the truck at the beach, Ocean Grove.   Tourists there also asked for Snapple all the time, despite the fact that we made fresh iced tea from actual tea bags every day and advertised this within the store. They also asked for Frappuccinos, which are pretty much only done at Starbucks. They complained that things didn't taste like they did at Starbucks. When I say that the place I worked at was an independent coffee shop, I mean it wasn't a Starbucks, and was proud not to be one. Tourists have horrible taste. They also do obnoxious things like pay for a dollar Icee with a burned twenty-dollar bill, and not tip. That happened once, but I couldn't understand the logic of the action; if you're not rich enough to let the entire bill burn, why light it on fire in the first place? If you're stupid enough to burn money, don't do a half-assed job of it.   People at the beach are a decent source of income, but that's about all they're good for. Shore folk who live in beach towns all year have a word for these people: Bennys. Benny stands for Brooklyn, Elizabeth, Newark, New York - nearby cities that were once the main source of the tourists. Shore folk hate Bennys.

         Morgan and I are not full time shore residents, but we're not Bennys either. We spent our childhood summers at the beach, four towns apart from each other. Morgan's house was on my route; Bruce never put anyone on their own town. Her house is near the border of Bradley Beach and Ocean Grove, and it was the only place I stopped to go to the bathroom while on my route. If her parents were around, they would buy an ice from me, and if they had any food cooked from lunch or for dinner, they would give me a share. On weekends they'd stop by my truck at the beach while they were on bike rides to buy an ice and chat.

         The best part of working on an Ice truck is that almost everyone is incredibly excited to see you. The exceptions are the poor, cheap, or health conscious parents, which amount to the same thing to you: one less dollar in your pocket.   Other highlights include original conversationalists, staying parked by the beach with just enough business not to have to move your truck, pissing off the guy who comes out to tell you to move your truck by having customers, mothers who had to work when they were in school but have money now, light breezes, ghetto juice, punk rock college radio stations, kite enthusiasts, your friend's parents on bike rides carrying plastic containers with food in them, your own parents visiting you at work and carrying bottles of water, sundown, and lines of people that lead around the block.

         The worst part is everything else. The annoying customers, the cuts and spliced fingers, numb arms/ legs/ butts, lightheadedness, headaches, hunger, past-capacity bladders, the bastardized version of the tarantella that is permanently burned into your memory, the bad jokes, the kids who pay in pennies so they can shortchange you because they know you don't care enough to count every single coin, the kids who don't know how many coins equal a dollar, the kids who are in their thirties and slow and don't know that you don't have ice cream sammiches, the Ice Cream Man half a block ahead of you, kids who change their mind, many other varieties of annoying children, many varieties of agitated parents, and a trucker's tan.   If you're lucky, you will see the humor in the situation and make it to the end of the day without spitting in anyone's face or being spat on. Misfortune will bring a soul crushing depression and exhaustion to you, which only makes the job that much tougher to do.

         But the God-awful motherfucking heat is the absolute worst part. The heat, especially when combined with boredom, will drive you crazy. It will make you create soap operas will one and five dollar bills, where two George Washingtons run away together to escape the tyranny of the evil Abe Lincoln. It will lead you to create what could someday be the most successful movie franchise ever to feature two nerdy teens and their sexy robot, if only you had the time to shoot the scenes, or write the script, or type the title page. It will lead you to a panic attack when the roads flood during a flash storm and the power gets knocked out across half the county. There are tricks to learn that will momentarily relieve you, like sticking your head in the freezer, making friends with people on your route with pools or just hoses, wet bandanas, and the like. But there is nothing more disgusting than watching yourself sweat into the freezer and praying to god that it fell between the tubs of ice that time. Well, there is one thing worse- the multicolored rag towels that get cleaned once every two weeks.   That's only because the towel soaks up the dirt and the sweat and smells of it for the next week and a half, as opposed to letting crud freeze on top of the ice and serving it to some yuppie on vacation.

           I spent more hours with Truck Ten than I did with any person over the summer. I know it so well I have dreams in that truck. Ice Cream Trucks are not known for their speed, but Ten could get surprisingly fast when you drove AND used the gas petal. But in first gear, Ten didn't do so well. Sometime in July, Don overheated the engine, so from time to time, Ten would get the shakes. I like to think that Ten and I had an understanding wherein each day it would get me through the fifty miles that made up my route, and I would do it the favors of cleaning and not wrecking it. Amazingly I made it through the summer with only two mishaps on the road. On my second day as I was getting on the off ramp from the gas station I hit a barrel with my side mirror. That night as I pulled into Ten's parking spot, I hit the mirror on Janet's truck next to me. That was my only bad driving day of the summer. I never crashed, not even in August, on the last day of an insanely hot four-day stretch of work, when the biggest storm of the past ten years hit the coast. Tree branches fell left and right and part of the main road back to Weaserville closed because of downed power lines and I couldn't even hear the directions the cops were shouting to me from their car five feet away over the rain, and Ten got me home in one piece.   Towards the end of the summer, I began calling Ten the Deluxe, because it never gave me trouble and had a nicer interior than the other cars on the lot. The trucks were constantly breaking down, like the day Morgan was driving and Nine lost its power steering in the middle of an intersection. There were flat tires, and transmission problems, and overheated engines, and accidents, but Ten never misbehaved with me.

         At the end of the day, I got to turn off the loudspeaker and the sidelights and drive down the highway back to Weaserville.   I never went home before nine pm, and I usually arrived at the yard around nine thirty. I was almost always one of the last trucks to get back. After dumping the empty tubs and garbage into the dumpster, washing down the floor with the hose, counting up the money in the tip cup, and neatly arranging the bills face up, I went inside to the only room in Monmouth County where I could truly unwind.   Inside the Weaser office, Bruce would sit behind his desk, counting up everyone's earnings for the day. The other drivers would be seated in chairs and on stools as worn out we were, tucked in corners around the room. We'd wait for Bruce to ask us about our day on the road, recount our annoying, stupid, weird, and favorite customers, and laugh at how similar everyone and everything was. We'd compare how much we all earned, impressed by those who earned more than we did, sympathetic for the lower trucks, and condescending towards Annika for always being the lowest truck. It was the only place where everyone in the room understood you and knew what your day had been like. Janet or Scott would come in from measuring cups and ice, and tell who was the flattest scooper and who earned the most money per inch that day.   When the money was counted, and all the totals entered into the computer, it was time to go.

         Morgan and I carpooled to and from work, so our conversations about Weaser would last the whole drive home, and usually extended through dinner as well since we ate together afterwards. We only talked about Weaser, because we had little interaction with the world outside of work. When we had alternating days off, rather than talk about what either of us had done with the day off, we discussed what had happened at Weaser first, so that we didn't miss any gossip. When Santo made high truck again, when Beardo Number Two quit because the commute was too long, when a tired parent asked me for an arsenic flavored Icee, when Herb hassled Scott at the beach, when nothing much happened at all, we spent hours discussing the events of the day. Weaser became such a huge part of our lives, it eclipsed everything else.

         While cleaning up recently, I found Janet's email address, WeaserChica @ something that really should heave been Weaser.com. Jobs frequently create your identity, but never have I seen anywhere affect that so much as at Weaser. You spend the majority of your day alone. The people you meet only know you as one of the kids who drive the Weaser truck, and they really don't care about anything else.   You drive into and out of their lives in a minute and only leave a stain on their tongue to prove you were ever there. If it wasn't you, it'd be some other schlub in their blue stained hi-tops getting cramps in their wrist over demonic children shrieking for syrup. Weaser kept me busy, and tired, but I don't know that I could say fulfilled. There were so many days when I would ask myself why I kept showing up for work. But I always knew why.

         Velcroed to the counter of every truck is a peanut can with a slot cut in the lid, the label removed and "College Fund" written on the side in black marker, although Snack, Lunch, or Drug Fund would probably be more accurate. In order to have customers place a tiny amount of money into this can, you will whore yourself out a little bit more every day. You will smile for people you wish would die. You will wait for kids who have thrown rocks at you. You will witness minor acts of child abuse and say nothing, nor react in the slightest. You will flirt. You will wear pushup bras and low cut shirts. You will question the legitimacy of feminism. You will sacrifice the best haircut of your life, given to you by a close friend, for a far less flattering but more socially acceptable style from a salon at the mall. You will laugh at jokes that make you want to pierce your eardrums with your car keys. You will debate how much damage an ice cream scoop will do to a human head, and create forms of torture in your mind that would make Nazis proud. You will learn to hear selectively. You will ignore insults from people that make your skin crawl. You will ignore guilt for supporting obesity, wasting gas, robbing children and the poor of money they do not have, and helping racism and sexism. You will hate the rich.   You will hate Don for consistently bringing in more money than you on the same route. You will take any sympathy offered. You will live for alternating brief moments of Zen and spite. You will ignore how much you smell, and how gross your skin feels. You will fall in love with a five-year-old blond boy who lives at the dead end of E CURTIS ST because he has not yet had his spirit broken like you have, and is not yet old enough to throw rocks at you. You will hate his neighbors because they take forever and there are six of them and only one of them speaks English, and know you're being unfair. You will continue to be unfair.

         You will do this all for a dollar, and if you're lucky, an extra dollar in the tip cup.   Your happiness will correlate directly to the money in your pocket. Your only solace is at the end of the day. Then you can commiserate with those who've gone through the same experiences.   It's only slightly better knowing that others are doing the same on their routes. I'd say there was a special section of Hell laid aside for us, but I'm fairly certain we've already seen it.