On any given summer night on 15th Avenue in Mount Vernon, you longed for 8:45PM. You'd hear the bells first on 13th Avenue and then 14th Avenue.
The Good Humor truck was coming.
It was like our nightly version of the River City folks in "The Music Man" waiting for the Wells Fargo wagon. You had the buck or so in your pocket since dinner. You were checking it every once in a while throughout the night. Between innings of your softball game. During a break in the action of Monopoly. In the middle of an insult assault being thrown at someone. You didn't want to come up empty at 8:44PM when the truck turned down our block
Our Good Humor man was an African-American guy by the name of Coot. Lest you think that the name signified some old crony with tons of stories about the South, Coot was about 30 and nobody really knew how he got that name. Or was it a nickname? A mystery for the ages.
Coot pretty much always had a smile on his face, but I heard him utter only two phrases ever: "Whacha have?" and "Here ya go." This wasn't exactly Masterpiece Theater, but who cared as long as you got your designated nightly treat. My daily regimen of sugar/poison was the Chocolate Chip Candy stick. It was a regular chocolate-covered ice cream bar, but deep down in the center was a frozen chocolate bar. A challenge for the incisors, but so good.
At one point, Coot got a little competition. Some interloper driving a rival Bungalow Bar truck tried to undercut him by showing up an hour earlier. It was probably the first organized protest I was ever involved in. We boycotted this rat bastard, and gave major stinkeye to anybody who even dared run up to that truck with fifty cents in their hand. We even had a song dedicated to this inferior product.
Bungalow Bar. Tastes like tar. The more you eat it, the sicker you are.
Message delivered. We kicked his ass over the city line and let him work the gremlins in the north Bronx.
There was another ill-fated attempt by somebody to claim our neighborhood as their own ice cream domain. That wretched Mister Softee. With that maniacal logo of some guy with an ice cream cone for a head. And that awful droning jingle that played over and over and over. But, of course, Mister Softee completely misread our marketplace. They would show up at 2:30 in the afternoon. Puh-leze. Not ice cream time at all. The deranged conehead did not survive for long. But, it wasn't due to any moratorium conducted by the kids in the neighborhood. One day, this fat kid named Georgie fell in front of the truck and almost had a Phil Leotardo experience as the truck inched forward. He was pulled back at the very last minute, saving him from a truly ironic spin on the Mister Softee concept. After that, Mister Softee's tasty treat made a hasty retreat.
The winner and still champion. Coot! We'd even forgive his annual faux pas. We always went back to school the first week of September. That meant earlier bedtimes, a little homework, etc.. Nevertheless, Coot continued to show up at 845PM every night for at least two more weeks. We always sat in our respective homes, listening to the bells that went unanswered. Was he that out-of-tune with our lives? Oh, what the hell...
One Chocolate Chip Candy please.
Dinner last night: Super All Beef Dodger Dog at the game.
1 comment:
My Bronx neighborhood was pretty much ruled by Mr Softee about whom I have no complaints. I did dig Good Humor up in Peekskill, and we had a similar scene where the bells would chime every night after dinner. We'd run out of the house and dutifully wait for him to turn down at the dead end and come back. Those bells are a quintessential sound of summer. So is the distinct THUNK of the doors on the truck when they were shut. You needed long arms to be a Good Humor man and reach to the back of the freezer. And then there was his change thingy filled with quarters, nickels and dimes.
These days it's Ben & Jerry's from the freezer in Ralphs. Tasty but no bells.
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