Primal 'Scream

I'M ON A RAVING SUGAR HIGH. Great Kaleidoscopic smears of chocolate pudding, double oreo, and black raspberry goo up my arms; hot fudge is dribbling across my wrists and my scooper is slicing flesh off my fingers as I mash up another smoosh-in.

It's Saturday night at Herrell's, and I'm working my weekly 7 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. shift. Money is not what brought me here--at under $4 an hour Herrell's is no economic match for Mother Harvard's extravagant wages. Herrell's is purely an escape, a chance to be completely weird for six hours, and getting paid is just an excuse to indulge in the surreal pleasures of the ice cream world.

Carefully bending a taster spoon between my teeth, I snap and catapult it at Nancy. It smacks into the back of her neck and she jerks forward into the spray hose hanging next to the smoosh board. Its handle depresses, drenching her leg with water. "Hose-shot, hose-shot!" I chant, dancing triumphantly out of her reach. The waist high smoosh-hose is a chronic problem for scoopers, whose rushes to the board often leave them looking incontinent. Nancy sends a confetti cloud of powdered Reeses at my head.

The warm, sweet-smelling atmosphere of ice cream and music behind the counter always floats me into a completely primal mode of being. I drift and bop in a peacefully chaotic world, popping taster spoons until my stomach bloats, bullshitting with my fellow scoopers, or flying into smart-ass raps with the customers.

If anybody gets bored, "work" is always there to divert our attention. There's no purposeful social setting, or hidden "friendly" agenda, and so there's no pressure to build conversations. We free associate through the shift with random spurts of silliness and sarcasm--a relaxed series of laughs and banter whose only structure is our scooping dance between customers.

"Uh, excuse me?" Distracted from my smooshing, I look up across the multicolored barrier of goody boxes and smeared glass countertop. My customer coughs again. "Uh, I wanted Heath bar, not Reeses, if that's okay?" Stifling an urge to scoop his eyes out and fling them into the goody pile, I glance down at the smoosh-in board. Sure enough, my--his--glob of cinnamon-nutmeg is sprinkled with the wrong damn goody.

"Whoops, sorry." I smile a sugar-high smile and, jitterbugging to the music that's struggling out of the backroom speakers, spin back to the ice cream tubs.

The customers. That's the only rigid intrusion on our free-form world. Presumptuous twits. From their cash-for-'cream outlook across the counter, all they see are neatly lettered flavor lists, the digital register, and a convenient human production-line waiting to place their order before them. You order, you pay, you eat your ice cream. A nice little sequence that's as smoothly cause-and-effect as popping coins in the Coke machine. Wrong.

While they shuffle through the orderly single-file maze of the serving line, we twirl spastically from one tub to another, careening around arms and flailing scoops to finally smack cups onto the counter, then pivot to the register, ducking around cone-wielding scoopers. It's a sport more intricate than basketball, with the interesting complication that the other team is working with the wrong set of rules.

Customers come in with the assumption that I'm there not to manipulate, but to help them. However, I take great pleasure in forcing their insulated consumer world into contact with my behind-the-counter lunacy.

"Gee, I didn't know it cost that much--that's pretty expensive for ice cream." Caught in the middle of ringing up, I'll slowly roll my eyes towards the enormous self-evident price list hanging from the ceiling, then, curling my lip, bring my glare back down to their now-flustered faces.

Or there's the famous Subjective Questions: "Is it good?" or "Which is better, espresso or double oreo?" Why not ask me if painting is superior to sculpture? If life has meaning? If God is the Supreme Being, and if he is, why does he let ice cream give you zits? For all I know, you believe M&M's are pestilent globules of government-produced chemicals and think that cockroaches are great for making low-budget escargot. I don't know what you'll like, so don't ask me.

And although customers seem to believe that I'm an omniscient being who can anticipate and direct their every want ("I want...a sundae." What kind? "Ahh...hot fudge." Pause. Any ice cream with that? "Oh...What's good?) they will simultaneously assume that I'm a deaf and dumb sub-human creature.

With not more than six inches of counterspace separating us, customers will carry on intensely private conversations. That is, until I break the illusion of my non-existence by cheerfully interrupting. Grinning stupidly into their startled faces I might ask, "Do you guys really think Melissa should break up with Paul? He doesn't sound so bad." Retreating in confusion they'll scuttle down the line, conversation at an end.

There's also the flipside of this relationship, in which customers screw around with me. This only happened in the days when I was still docilely trying to fulfill my official role as a paid servant, long before I learned to twist customer relations to my own advantage.

My first torturer was a ROTC-Nazi whose sundae-cup scraped across the glass counter, filling me with nails'n'blackboard shudders. "Man, that's a terrible noise," I laughed shakily. A sinister, piggy gleam lit up ROTC-Nazi's eyes. He scraped the cup again. A mistake, an accident, I thought, as my body convulsed.

I repeated myself hopefully. "A terrible noise." ROTC-Nazi smiled dreamily, close to some savage epiphany. Again, the cup scraped. I snapped. "Yo, cut it out, jerk." The Nazi merely sniggered, and cruised down the line.

Another form of harrassment comes from people who think I can hand out free food. They employ a couple of tactics. The hip, let's-be-brothers approach is a favorite. "Hey dude, whyncha sneak me a coupla more goodies?" they wink, bodies contorted by the old Monty Python nudge-nudge routine. Say no more, say no more.

Next is the gee-I'm-so-cute-and-friendly approach, usually employed by girls and unctuous preppies. "Aw, c'mon, please, pretty please," they whine, eyelids batting somewhere down about the level of their drooling lips. But most annoying is the dissatisfied customer angle, to which there is no legally permissible reply. "Hey kid! I get more than that don't I!?" No you DON'T, no you DON'T.

At first--again before I got sly--I would mumble excuses about getting fired. But now I retreat from the counter, take a moment to listen to the stereo, and return with a wink and a smile. "I gave you more," I lie, and they shuffle happily off.

Roommates and visiting friends are another source of troublesome entertainment from the other side of the counter. If there's more than one friend visiting, a competition immediately starts to see who can make me screw up first. Once, distracted by a shouting friend, I let the blender slice into the cup I was holding. Half-churned vanilla and shredded paper spewed across the service area, covering me and my customer with sticky blobs.

It's toward the end of the night and the joyful confusion which is the scooper's basic element has accelerated. Orders are forgotten, the radio gets louder, we smash into each other more frequently, and the accumulation of goop spreads into face and hair. Revelling in the chaotic, carnival atmosphere I put up my sweatshirt hood to accentuate my insanity. This provokes customer comment. Customers never expect a reply. "He must be getting cold (snigger snigger)." My eyes roll, scoop clatters from my hand. "No I'm not. I'm just fucking weird." Nodding cowed agreement, the line moves on. Chuckling quietly, I return to my smooshing.

Just before closing, the crowd is backed up to the door and I'm surrounded momentarily by scoopers with whom I've never worked before. My roommate Ted enters and, snickering, announces to the store that we are, in fact, secret lovers. There is a pause in the serving rush as scoopers and customers eye me with raised eyebrows. Ahhh, this homophobic world we live in.

Then finally the door is locked, and we speed up a notch to clean up. Legs out in a Chuck Berry Duck Walk, I hop around singing into my mop while the manager rushes about waving correction slips and time cards. Then we're in the service area, cranking out the final tasks. Both choosing the same moment to drag out an ice cream tub, we collide. Eyes bugging, faces centimeters apart, we break into a primal scream duet. Nancy joins us, and we all scream again, faces flushed, drowning out the music, and then finally collapsing into exhausted laughter. Closing time.