7 CAPITALIZING ON THE UNSUNG PERKS OF INFAMY
Life is one long knot in the gut
interrupted only by extended bouts of anxiety
and fleeting moments of unwarranted euphoria.
—Robert Blessing
. . . There you have in writing my lifelong credo. And a damn fine and levelheaded credo it was, until Cori came along and the euphoria felt neither fleeting nor unwarranted. Maybe Cutcheon was wrong. Maybe happiness was not a myth. Or maybe married life had turned me into a sap and, before long, I’d pay the price.
We were coming up on our first anniversary when the unraveling commenced. A Tuesday morning. I was at work. The phone rang. The first of what would be three sketchy calls.
I canted to the left, a gallon jar of maraschino cherries under my arm, as I fumbled for the receiver. The caller introduced himself as a math teacher from Ballston Spa High School, a status calculated to grant him instant standing and respect.
He lived down the road in Wilton, and he had a bone to pick: “My wife nearly choked to death last night because of you.”
I eased the jar onto the table, racked my brain for an alibi, my instinct more fight than flight. Where was I last night? Who was I with? What was on TV?
“That ice cream of yours, with the chewing gum . . . ”
“Gumball Choo Choo?”
“Well, son, one of your gumballs caught Charlie right at the back of the throat, come up through her straw like a shot.”
I played the straight man. “She was drinking it? A milkshake?”
“If I’d been out, God knows, I’d be planning Charlotte’s funeral.”
Now to my way of thinking, a flavor that goes by the name of Gumball Choo Choo might lead one to count on a gumball or two, and one might want to proceed with caution if inclined to make an asshat milkshake of it. And where the hell did she come up with a straw wide enough to accommodate a gumball?
All the same, the remorse gushed out of me by rote: “Look, I’m real, real sorry, sir. Please, next time you’re in the neighborhood, let me make it up to you and your wife.”
The guy did not laugh, he guffawed. His spittle engorged both ends of the line. “Well, son, I can be there lickety-split. I’m in my car as we speak. In your parking lot.”
I sent him home to wifey with four complimentary tubs, a t-shirt, a fistful of plastic spoons, and a brotherly slap on the back.
Customers had shaken me down plenty over the years. It was the cost of doing business. Buy them off, shut them up, keep the bottom feeders satisfied, Stupid Charlotte and MathMan the latest in a long line.
It had worked like a charm too, or so I thought, until a few days later when the Saratoga County Department of Health put me on notice. There’d been a complaint. No details, only that “action was pending pursuant to review of said food service establishment premises.”
Stupid Greedy Lying Charlotte and her mutant milkshake. Makes you wonder about people. You bend over backward. You give them every reason to love and forgive you. Four tubs and a t-shirt, don’t forget. And still they come at you. Tells you all you need to know about the milk of human kindness, room temp or deep frozen.
I had nothing to hide. Not when it came to ice cream.
June of 2019, Cori and I celebrated our anniversary and the best damn year of our respective lives. I had spared her the news about the Saratoga County Department of Health, projecting an admirable stoicism as I waited for the other shoe to drop.
I hadn’t expected the shoe to belong to Lenora-Jo Coffey, the Times Union food and wine critic. She caught me on my cell. Caller number two.
“Nice to hear from you,” I said.
“Is it?”
“I hope so.”
“I assume you’re aware, in addition to my regular column, I am now the paper’s featured blogger on food-related issues. Coffey’s Cream?”
“Sure,” I lied. “It’s great.”
“Yes, well, the purpose of my call is to fact-check a story.” She read me the headline: “‘Is ice cream a weapon of choice for the son of the Brittle Butcher?’”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said, hackles rising.
“You tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“I am doing you a courtesy, a chance to tell your side, Mr. Blessing. Or are you more at ease with Mr. Dick?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“So you claim not to be the son of Henry Taylor Dick?”
“Not quite.”
“According to my sources—”
“For Christ’s sake, it’s Dickens. D-I-C-K-E-N-S. Not Dick.”
“Calm down. It was a slip of the tongue. I would not have let it go to press as such.”
“Either way, I am not my father.”
“You know what they say, though, Mr. Blessing, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“My blog had over seven thousand unique visitors last month alone. Do you know how good that is? People are interested in what I have to say. An exclusive like this will go viral, put me on the national stage.”
“An exclusive what? There is no story.”
“Don’t let it be said I didn’t give you every opportunity to rebut.”
“Look, if we got off on the wrong foot, I’m sorry—”
“Oh, you will be.”
“The piece you wrote for me was great. I thanked you. I sent flowers, ice cream. You even got my name right.”
“You lied to me.”
“I what?”
“You told me you were gay.”
“I never said any such thing.”
“You led me on.”
“I led you nowhere.”
“I was willing to give myself to you.”
“What, you’re so irresistible, no guy has turned you down before?”
“Never a single one. Never a straight one.”
“There’s a first for everything.”
“You humiliated me.”
“I don’t see how.”
“You married my dentist.”
“What? Cori? Is this a joke?”
“You should have fucked me when you had the chance. Now I’m going to fuck you.”
Coffey had talent, I give her that. She was candid about the rumors and innuendo that drove her exposé. She stated at the outset the accusations against me were tenuous. Alleged appeared no fewer than eighteen times as she detailed my guilt. The unnamed couple from Wilton. The heads-up from the Health Department. Plus incidents I barely remembered and others I could swear had never happened.
Yeah, Coffey had it all and then some, including how generously I treated disgruntled customers. Nonetheless, by the end of her diatribe, even I was ready to steer clear of Loony Scoops. Whatever I had or hadn’t done, the case was open and shut.
No sooner did Coffey’s blog go live than alleged Loony Scoops customers came alive, going wide with gaggy thingamabobs and what-nots they had fished from my ice cream. I was hung, drawn, and quartered on Twitter, as outraged tweets and retweets of my misdeeds flew in from ice cream fanciers nearby and far-flung. Saratoga, Halfmoon, Clifton Park, Schuylerville, and Glens Falls. Canberra, Taiwan, London, Edmonton, and Whatthefuck. If the item existed in the material world, Loony Scoops ice cream contained it in the frozen world.
Coffey’s Cream hit the viral jackpot. Likes. Shares. Shares of shares. Retweets. Retweets of retweets. Every damn warrior on the web took the story to their freeze-dried hearts. The trolls spared no flavor, except Mango Basil, which was a bust to begin with. Harder to take were the trolls who made it personal.
Dick would be amended to Dickson and, later, Dickson to Dickens. If Coffey offered a mea culpa, I missed it.
Loony Scoops and I were done. All my work added up to zip. It was Home Sweet Hellsdale all over again. Helpless. Hopeless.
There was no hiding the facts from Cori, now. She strove to be the voice of moderation. “You’ve been through worse,” she assured me, muted reference to Death Row Dad. “You’ll get through this too.”
“I should close up while I’m ahead.”
“I’ve got a good job. I make good money. Take advantage of it. Move on to something else. Start fresh. Write that book.”
“What I need is a lawyer.”
“Are you crazy? A lawyer will only keep the story alive. You don’t want that. I certainly don’t.”
“Jesus, Cor, I’m not allowed to defend myself?”
“As if anything you say on social media or anywhere will make a difference? Really? People believe only what they already believe. You, of all people, know this.”
“And what about my father? How’d Coffey find out? Who tipped her off?”
“I wasn’t the first girl you told, Rob. You had to have known it would get out sooner or later.”
“You saying I wanted this to happen?”
“Did you?”
The drop-off in business was immediate. Only the uninformed, the unwired, and a coterie of loyal fringe-dwellers stuck by me. Some sought to cheer me up with what they imagined to be the silver lining. “Hey! No more waiting in long lines for ice cream. Woohoo!”
Even Frosty Freddo, my old mentor back in Syracuse, came out of the woodwork, dropped me a note.
While I appreciated Freddo’s email, I was too discouraged to pay it much heed. Depression had sent me a formal invitation and was waiting on my RSVP. But then, late on the afternoon of the second day, the fan stopped spinning and the shit stopped flying.
You know those old movies where some screw-up screws up worse than usual, and the cops and debt collectors and local hoods start tightening the screws, and just when you figure the poor sap is screwed-beyond-screwed, his friends and neighbors and loved ones, his unaccountably hot wife, they show up en masse to bail him out, and everybody cries and laughs and applauds?
Well, that’s what happened to me. Sort of.
It didn’t go down all at once, and it wasn’t as tearjerky as It’s A Wonderful Life, for instance, but it was enough for Cori to say, “I told you so.”
Five days in, the online outrage was isolated to an undercard of overmatched Johnny-come-latelies. Loony Scoops was back on track and gathering steam.
My takeaway baffled Cori. “I’m more of a nobody than I thought,” I said. “Figured I was worth a week of outrage at the very least.”
“Why did I marry you, again?” she asked.
There was no one factor as to why it blew over so quickly. There were a bunch.
One: Fatigue, for sure. A combination of mile-long Twitter threads and short attention spans.
Two: The relative insignificance of Loony Scoops. I was no Baskin-Robbins, no Ben & Jerry’s. My extinction would be light on bragging rights.
Three: The fearless anti-trolls and their hashtags, #ResistanceLoonyScoops and #SaveOurScoops. (I suspected Cori led the charge here, though she denied all.)
Four: My counterintuitive marketing.
I’d kept a running tally of the junk reported to have turned up in my ice cream. I joked to Cori how I should include a handout with every purchase. “To make life easier for customers who might want to jump on the bandwagon.”
She didn’t laugh. “It’s not a half-bad idea. Fight stupid with stupid. What do you have to lose?”
I beefed up the list a tad, printed it up on the morning of the third day. People laughed, gobbled it up, and shared it. The list went viral, outdoing even Coffey’s hatchet job.
Five: The good in people.
I’d stopped looking for the quality from an early age. The return had never justified my effort. Perhaps the trick to finding good was not to seek it, but to accept it. Faith is a wonderful thing. Lets you see everything without seeing anything.
Yup, across the board, the Saratoga County faithful and business community stood firm in my defense. Folks turned up at Loony Scoops in droves to blast the naysayers who had vilified their ice cream of choice. Even the math teacher and his lovely wife, gumball-choking Stupid Charlotte herself, pledged their allegiance. “Cross our hearts and hope to die, Mr. Blessing, our lips have been sealed. Swear to God in Heaven, we never gave the time of day to that snoopy reporter or anyone. It’s a crime what they’ve done to you. Lower than low.”
Curiosity seekers slithered in too, mingling with the locals. I could spot them, of course. Smell them. But as long as they were firming up my bottom line, I tolerated the finger-pointing and whispers and photo ops. Just sucked it all up. Didn’t so much as blink when asked to autograph their books and the horseshit pages devoted to my dad. You would not believe the shitload of so-called encyclopedias of serial killers out there.
The Pictorial Encyclopedia of Serial Killers & Murderers
The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers
The Encyclopedia of Modern Murder
Bad Girls Did It!: An Encyclopedia of Female Murderers
The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers
The Wikipedia Encyclopedia of Serial Killers
Human Monsters: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the World’s Most Vicious Murderers
Serial Killers Encyclopedia
Yup, I signed them all. Britannica and World Book might be on life support these days, but not these babies. The books are a category unto themselves, a publishing staple up there with miracle diets and thrillers with The Girl in the title. During Dad’s trial, pen and paper were regularly shoved in my face, but this was a first for my so-called adult life, and in the wake of Coffey’s attempted assassination, I’d turned sufficiently mercenary (i.e., practical) to go with the soul-crushing flow. Make hay while the sun shines.
I trusted none of it. I trusted no one. My sixth sense was pessimism. My seventh was cynicism. Bad stuff finds me. Always has. Started in the womb. My mother pressed her hands to her belly and there I was.
Sure enough, as if on schedule, John J. Tavasi, MD, MPH, Commissioner, Saratoga County Department of Health, announced publicly that “an expedited investigation into recent revelations concerning alleged irregularities and infractions of said dairy establishment has been launched.”
Enthusiasm for my plight waned. The vocal became less vocal. The Wilton Loony Scoopers, the Little League ball team I had sponsored since the day I opened, rubbed salt in the wound, dropping me in favor of the Valvoline in Halfmoon. So much for the free cones I’d shelled out after every win. In retrospect, I wished they’d been bigger losers.
Coffey’s handiwork and the ensuing ups and downs had spelled trouble for Cori too. We were having dinner, some pesto and pasta thing she’d culled from a waiting-room issue of Bon Appétit, when she got around to telling me. She’d kept it to herself for days.
Her boss, Dr. Beckman, had serious concerns. “He’s worried about ‘the bad press,’ as he put it. He wants me to take some time off ‘until the distasteful little matter goes away.’”
“I thought he had more brains . . . ”
“No you didn’t. You know he’s an ass.” She mimicked his squirrelly tenor: “‘We are concerned your familial notoriety will prove a detriment to patients. As dentists, my dear, we strike sufficient fear. Why exacerbate the problem? Your husband’s notoriety could well render difficulties for us as well, no need to mention.’”
“You kidding me?”
“Don’t worry. All’s fine. He backed off. But you might be a little angry with me.”
“Why would I—”
“For what I did.”
“Which was?”
“Promise not to freak.”
“What did you do, Cori?”
“Promise you won’t freak.”
“Tell me.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
“Well, I guess, I sort of mentioned how my husband wouldn’t take particularly kindly to the news.”
“And?”
“And that it’s not a good idea to get on his bad side, if you know what I mean—family history and all.”
Violence by association is the great unsung perk of infamy. I’d put it to good use too, plenty of times. “The asshole fell for it?”
“You should have seen his face,” she said, encapsulating in six one-syllable words the adventure that was married life with Cori, an ongoing reveal of facets unseen and unforeseen. I admit, when I first laid eyes on her, my hypothalamus processed only the basics on the sexism meter—beautiful, sexy, hot. Clearly, I can be as insensitive and shallow as any other guy abandoned by evolution. But before you stop reading and cancel me for life, you also need to know my love for her was because of the person she permitted me to see. Funny, kind, and independent. Mercurial, mordant, and whip-smart. She did not suffer fools gladly, though suffer them she did, until you crossed her subjective line and God spare your pissant soul. All this to say, a veiled suggestion of extreme violence was a nifty, if twisted, addition to Cori’s substantial repertoire. “The unspoken threat is fun,” she said. “It’s like dentistry, but with a soupçon of death.”
“Fear changes everything,” I said. “When I was a kid, I had this don’t-mess-with-me look.”
“You? Like a badass thing?” She sat back in her chair. “Show me.”
“It’s been so long.” I wished I hadn’t let the crazy thing slip. “You’ll laugh.”
“Maybe I can use it on Beckman.”
“Sounds like you did fine on your own.”
“C’mon, Rob. You don’t bring up something like that and keep it to yourself.”
“You won’t like it.”
“Let me be the judge.”
“It’s dumb.”
“C’mon.”
“No, I’m serious, you won’t like it. It’s not anything you need to see.”
“You don’t scare me, Robbie.” She was teasing, I know. But I also heard the challenge. You can’t scare me, Ice Cream Boy.
I rose from my seat, kicked the chair aside. I adjusted my stance to the stationary swagger. I assumed the demeanor, smiled the smile that wasn’t a smile. Cracked my wrists, knuckles, thumbs. Curled fingers into fists. Let my focus drift to where she wasn’t, to where she’d be when I was done with her. To what she’d be. Breathed deep, then not at all.
There was nothing to it, really. Jekyll morphing into Hyde.
Her giggle tailed off. “You don’t scare me,” she said again, less confident now, unsure as to whether I was horsing around or prepping a dive from the high board into an empty pool.
“But I could,” I said, with an intensity I intended and regretted. Two quick steps and I was in her face, staring her in the face, without seeing her face.
She held my eyes a fraction of a blink, her face as white as my knuckles. “Stop it,” she shot back. “Don’t you ever . . . What the hell was that? What the hell was that?”
I stood down, returned from the place I’d been, reminded myself to breathe. “You wanted to see it.”
“It wasn’t you.”
“I thought you’d laugh.”
“You weren’t funny.”
“I’m sorry.” I reached for her hand, but she’d have none of me. Her entire purpose in life was to bus the dishes from the table. My guilt soared. “I’m sorry. Honest. I don’t know where it came from.”
“Yes, you do. Don’t lie to me. You damn well do.”
I gathered up the forks and knives, spewed apology upon apology. She froze at the sound of the clatter. Glanced at my hands, my face. “What the hell is wrong with you?” Shook her head. Fled the room.
I didn’t get it. Took a moment.
The knives in my hand. Jesus.
She had seen only the knives in my hand.
If you had your doubts about me before, chances are you’ve got more of them now. Strike two! I know how bad the above makes me look. But I am not that guy. I have never been that guy. Except when I needed to be that guy. And I never was or needed to be that guy with Cori. She asked and I showed her. I warned her she wouldn’t like it and, sure enough, she didn’t. That’s all there was to it. At worst, miscommunication.Think about it. It’s my book, right? I’m writing it, right? Would I have told you any of this if I actually was that guy? At the very least, allow me the opportunity to explain, same way Cori allows me to in the next chapter. Stay with me till then. It’s all I ask.
I was at her heels, nearing the top of the stairs, when my cell rang. Why I stopped to answer, I’ll never know. The third caller.
“Am I speaking to Mr. Robert Blessing?” Caller ID came up empty. “God bless, it is an honor to speak with you, sir.”
“Look, I don’t have time—”
“Should the hour be inconvenient, sir, I apologize. However, I am hoping you will indulge me a moment or two. It is in reference to your father’s last words, sir, as alluded to in the very excellent Death Row Digest podcast—”
“Are you reading from a script?”
“Yes, well, several sources suggest your father will not actually deliver his last words . . . ”
“Who are you? How’d you get this number?”
“ . . . Rather, Mr. Dickens says he will leave them to you, his one and only child. I was wondering if you—”
I did not throw the phone, I punched the damn thing dead. I’d change the number the next day.
I know I shouldn’t have. I did not want to. I opened iTunes, found the podcast, and fast-forwarded.
A corrections officer speaks, his voice distorted:
“So I ask him one day. I says, ‘Tell me, Henry, planning on any last words? I mean, it’ll be real helpful to your victims’ families, you know, give ’em some peace of mind.’ All those folks, not knowing why he did what he did. Imagine living with that. Senseless deaths and such. I was just saying, you know, suggesting he make amends. Never figured to get a rise out of him. But Henry, he looks me dead in the eye, man to man, and says, ‘When I’m dead, ask my son. He’ll have them for you.’”
I swear, I hadn’t a clue what my father was talking about. Not then.