I can understand how the recent heat wave might have caught the deli owners of the city unawares in the ice-cream-novelty department. After all, March lasted approximately two months longer than it’s supposed to, and then we got a few weeks of April, and then two days of May, and then we just went straight into August without so much as a by-your-leave, so last week, the fact that the deli downstairs had a whole pallet of instant hot chocolate and not much in the way of frozen fatty goodness, I could forgive.

But it’s week two of the sticky weather, and it’s clear that the deli guys and I need to have a little talk, because they let me owe them a quarter if I come up short, and they gave me a free cheese sandwich when the sign board over the counter almost fell on my head — they seem like nice, reasonable men. Men who should have gotten some damn ice cream sandwiches into the freezer case by now, in other words, and yet have not. And what is the point of even operating a freezer case if fully one quarter of it is not devoted to one of the most delicious treats known to humankind, melty vanilla ice cream nestled between two cakey slabs of chocolate…cakey something-or-other that sticks to your fingers?

Yet not a single ice cream sandy haunts the frosty precincts of the deli’s freezer case. I stuck my entire head and torso into the freezer case, just to make sure; I would have eaten one from the nineties, mummified in the permafrost like Piltdown Man, had I found one, but I did not. Nor did I find a Chipwich, which is unacceptable. The Chipwich is a weak substitute for a Good Humor ice cream sandwich as it is, but not to even offer that second-rate, but still cleverly round and cookie-licious, puck of snacky coldness instead? Dear sirs: Oh hell no.

I did find all the crappy frozen delicacies heavily represented, and excuse me, but can we just talk about sucky stupid Bomb Pops for a second? Why is there a WMD cache’s worth of Bomb Pops in here? Because nobody in the history of summer has ever said, “You know what I’d really like, is a Bomb Pop.” Noooooobody. The only reason to eat a Bomb Pop is because it’s hotter than Venus at the street fair and the Bomb Pop stand is the closest source of brain freeze available. A Bomb Pop is not craved. A Bomb Pop is tolerated, made do with. It tastes like metal and it takes your tongue three days to go back to its normal color after eating one, so don’t waste valuable freezer-case real estate on Bomb Pops that you could devote instead to the Flying Sicle Brothers: Pop, Fudge, and Cream. I love Creamsicles. Love them! If the deli stocked Creamsicles, the deli owner could build a new wing on his house in about a month, because I would buy them, daily, frequently, early and often, even in the winter, because of the very deep, very real love. I would buy Fudgsicles, too, even though it annoys me that it is spelled “Fudgsicle” and not “Fudgesicle,” and I would even now and then on a very hot day buy a Popsicle, even though eh. But there is not a Sicle to be had. There is…banana Frozfruit. Um. No.

See, banana Frozfruit is the kind of Frozfruit you had to put up with if you had a mom who Did Not Believe In Sugary Snacks, because the banana Frozfruit seemed more earnestly healthy and worthwhile than the other, more appealing, less brown and scabrous Frozfruits. If you had a Did Not Believe In Sugary Snacks mom, a Fruit Is Nature’s Candy mom, you suffered through years of fruit juice frozen into those horrid Tupperware freezing racks, which allegedly you could just pull the healthsicle out of but it never worked, leaving you to crunch on a depressingly misshapen blob of frozen Mott’s with granola or muesli or some twiggy shit sprinkled on it instead of something with actual corn syrup and a handful of jimmies, or perhaps an anencephalic asteroid of orange juice which still managed to have gaggy pulp in it even in its solid form, or, on particularly unlucky days, a poo-esque chunk of the foul garbagey-smelling prune-adjacent concoction known to scores of traumatized children as Juicy Juice — or you could have lime sherbet, which looked and tasted like hospital, in a sugar-free cone that first squeaked Styrofoamily on your teeth and then lodged in said teeth for two hours, or you could pucker and shudder through one of those revolting Tuscan frozen-yogurt bars, which doesn’t sound that bad, but back in the days before MTV, frozen yogurt did not taste good. Regular yogurt did not taste good, either; yogurt sucked, and because adults usually paired it with wheat germ, it seemed just generally like a foodstuff to avoid strenuously. But then Tuscan came out with the yogsicles, and you could see the strawberry chunks, and it didn’t have the icky whey on the top like regular yogurt, and you knew your mom might consider it an acceptable alternative because of all the hippie blathering about calcium on the label, so you hoped, and you begged, and she bought it, and oh, the disappointment. You should have known when she gave in that it would probably taste like a toe dipped in Triaminic yellow cough syrup, and so it did.

All this by way of saying that I can just eat a damn banana standing right in front of the air conditioner if I feel that strongly about it instead of buying a banana Frozfruit. The awesome Frozfruits, raspberry and coconut, get snapped up right away, leaving banana and lime, which…good concept, notes-of-ammonia execution, so nobody ever buys the lime ones, just takes them out as a backup until they find a better treat and then puts them back in so they’ve half-melted and refrozen twenty times. And that green is scary. Not as scary as the Deliverance Chief Crunchie I found frozen in a ninety-degree angle in one corner (…what? I thought it might be an ice cream sandwich!), but still — and hey, why not stock up on those bad boys too? Or the little ice-cream cups with the wooden spoon that gives you splinters on your soft palate? I love those things!

I dug around for one of those too, and again, no joy, so I figured I’d just buy a pint of vanilla and a pint of chocolate and work it out with a bowl upstairs — and I swear to God, the least complicated pint flavor in the case? Chocolate Almond Heath Bar. Not that it doesn’t sound yummy, but when did single-flavor ice cream become a rarity? Because when we went to Baskin Robbins as a kid (my mom was kind of a DNBISS type, but not mercilessly so), they had, like, six flavors available, three of which you could find in Neapolitan, and even that was like, whoa, three kinds in one box? Now Cookies ‘n’ Creme is practically Amish; every flavor is, like, Fudge Medallion Brickle Jubilee With Raisin-Studded Peeps, and the little signs on the case talk about top notes like it’s a wine or something…what ever happened to, you know, coffee? Butter pecan? And the sorbet flavors, oy. Enough with the kiwi. Hairy on the outside, grainy on the inside — not an association I want in a dessert, frankly. You know what I’d like? Lemon. Just…lemon. Not a kiwi-blueberry infusion, not a mango-loganberry whip, just lemon damn sherbet. Ice, flavoring, spoon, happy.

I didn’t have this puritanical bent as a child. I inevitably ordered the most disgusting, decadent, twilight-of-Rome dish Baskin Robbins had to offer, and if it didn’t seem diabetic-shock-inducing enough on its own, I’d get some random topping on it for good measure. Every time my mother relented and hit the drive-thru Friendly’s window on the way home from the pool, our car wound up holding up the show for ten minutes while she begged me to reconsider the double scoop of watermelon sherbet with chocolate jimmies on it, because…it’s just gross, obviously, but I loved it, I considered it my signature ice cream, and I would not hear about it from her. “How can you eat that?” I wonder that myself, now, and I wonder how I consumed, over the course of my childhood, at least three gallons of chocolate-and-peanut-butter ice cream without having a massive all-major-vessels-go-boom aneurysm of some kind and dropping dead on the sidewalk in front of 31 Flavors. Because they did not fuck around with the peanut butter. It was not a tasteful ribbon; it was not a sprinkling of Reese’s-Piece-sized bits. We’re talking fist-sized moon rocks of oily Smucker’s-style PB with a smattering of chocolate ice cream clinging to the edges like lichen to a windswept rock, and did I order it with marshmallow fluff? Yes. Yes, I did. And rainbow jimmies. And I would have gone for the hat trick by asking for butterscotch sauce, but inevitably a parent heard the telltale sizzle of tooth enamel dissolving and intervened before it could get that far…unless they’d left me home to babysit, at which time it went off the rails in an even more psychotic way. The nadir: peach ice cream, maple syrup, and the little silver balls you use for the eyes on reindeer-shaped Christmas cookies. I mean! So nasty, but man, I loved it — that, and stirring everything in the bowl together to make a gloppy pudding.

These days, I just want to keep it simple — I don’t even get a cone, it’s too messy and the bottom tip always seems to give way. Just strawberry is fine, or vanilla with a tiny thread of caramel. A Dove bar. Old-school institutional-green mint chocolate chip. And I don’t want to have to go all the way up the hill to the supermarket to get it so it’s all drippy when I get home, or to chase the Mr. Softee truck in my squeaky flip-flops all thwick thwock thwick thwock “wait up!” I just want to go downstairs, grab a sandy, paper-airplane a buck over the counter, and go back upstairs and flop on the couch and eat it sides-squeezed-out-first. And if I have to call Good Humor’s distribution center and pretend to be the deli guy to make that happen, I will totally do it. This is serious business.

June 13, 2005

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