3 BASIC MARKETING FOR ICE CREAM VENDORS
My father was Henry Taylor Dickens. You might have heard of him. The Dickens sticks in peoples’ minds. It’s a cute name for a killer. His nickname was cute too—the Brittle Butcher—though not as cute as it might have been. He could have been the Candyman, for instance, had it not been claimed in the early ’70s by two unrelated scumbags who lived in Texas, one of whom poisoned his son on Halloween with a treat tricked out in potassium cyanide.
It was Rory Thomas, an old-school newspaper guy from Chicago, who came up with the Brittle Butcher. He’s famous for coining nicknames for serial killers. Spree killers too. Just not rampage killers. Rampage killers never get nicknames. There’s no romance in school, concert, and shopping mall shootings. I spare no sympathy for any. Each and every perp is deserving of obscurity for all eternity. I apply the same to my dad, though it is too late to rein in his celebrity. This book will not help, of course. I apologize for this. And for my hypocrisy.
Rory Thomas turns up on TV whenever the body count ups the nation’s fear levels—you know, when you double-check the locks on your windows and doors, when you scope out the back seat of your car for crazies lying in wait, when you survey windows and rooftops for snipers adjusting their sights. Every network has their own Rory Thomas, but no talking head has a more envied track record in capturing the public’s imagination. His speculation on the who and the why typically features three or four catchy options that roll off the tongue, while inspiring a nifty logo. After Dad’s arrest, less canny media tested Twisted Dickens and David Slaughterfield, but literary allusions never go anywhere. Clever doesn’t cut it. Alliteration does. Then too, peanut brittle has that indefinable feel-good working for it, a Rory Thomas trademark.
The first person Dad killed lived in Montpelier, Vermont. His name was Alain Cousins. It was 1988. Mom and Dad were on their honeymoon. They were driving to Quebec City and spent a night in Montpelier, where Dad squeezed in some alone time.
Cousins had a wife and two daughters. He installed garage doors for a living. My father pulped his skull with a 36-inch winding bar.
I don’t know what a winding bar is. I can’t say my father knew, either. He pulled the winding bar from the rear of Alain Cousins’ van. It was never his practice to show up prepared. He was more into improv. He once killed a man with a vintage milk bottle. Another with a cuckoo clock. He broke his rule only once. The last time. The peanut brittle time.
Dad was a candy wholesaler. Right into the 2000s, he carried on the old-fashioned way, servicing his customers’ stores in person. Most were a dying breed of mom-and-pop shops, small-town throwbacks to a more obliging era. Despite my mother’s know-how and success, he’d opposed taking his business online. Thus, come December, the trunk of his Impala was packed with boxes of candy canes and peanut brittle. Had Dad reached for the candy canes, Rory Thomas might have gone with the Candy Cane Killer, which, if you ask me, would have been catchier than the Brittle Butcher. Such is fate. Either way, the killing would have retained the earmarks of improv. In this respect, the Improviser would have been the ideal nickname, had the ink not dried on Brittle Butcher before Dad’s pattern came to light.
You might say I followed in my father’s footsteps. Confections. Should killing people prove to be genetic too, I figure they’d call me something like the Waffle Cone Killer. Waffle cones can be dangerous, especially if dipped in chocolate and left to harden. You could drive the cone into somebody’s throat or slush up their brain through an eye socket. You’d need to practice, of course. Strike the collarbone first and the cone could crumble.
I didn’t plan on ice cream. My first choice was to be the next Rory Thomas. Coming up with nicknames for serial killers struck me as a fun way to make a buck. It was one of the reasons I spent three semesters in Journalism. Alas, my disillusionment grew with the curriculum. The only course offered on the nicknaming of serial killers was at the graduate level, a lousy partial credit at that.
I stuck with Frosty Freddo just shy of three years, until the January I took off for Penn State and what they call the Ice Cream Short Course. The smiley-face at the registration desk greeted me with a lemon-chiffon grin and a promise of “seven days of udder bliss.” A month later, diploma in hand, I moved to Malta in Upstate New York and before May was done, my bank account was drained and Loony Scoops was up and running. You couldn’t beat the location, Highway 9, south of Saratoga Springs, between Homewood Suites and P.J.’s BAR-B-QSA. Oh, man, the ribs, the brisket, the music.
Georgia Treasure is the flavor that put Loony Scoops and me on the map.
A Dixie-inspired mélange
of oven-roasted Spanish peanuts,
thick swirls of caramel fudge, a splash of peach,
a hint of mint, and decadently rich
triple-chocolate truffle ice cream.
Week after opening, I delivered a bucket to the Albany Times Union. Next I knew, Lenora-Jo Coffey, the paper’s legendary food and wine critic, was on the phone and making my day, her voice matter-of-fact and paper thin, in jarring contrast to the Baby Jane headshot that accompanied her feature: “So help me God, Mr. Blessing, your Georgia Treasure is the most divine thing I have licked in all my life.”
A day later, she was propped on a stool at the soda fountain, while I puttered about with tastings. She was so unlike the Lenora-Jo portrayed in the paper, I was about to ask for proof of identity when she said, “Don’t tell me you don’t know?”
“I guess I don’t.”
Nope, this couldn’t be Lenora-Jo. She was closer to middle age than coffin age, librarian assertive with a book-smart haircut and probing blue eyes behind no-frills frames. No turban. No hula hoop earrings. No push-broom lashes. No eyebrows arched in infinite delight. She cut to the chase: “Lenora-Jo Coffey, she isn’t real.”
“Seriously?”
“It’s common knowledge.”
“Not to me.”
“The paper made her up. Years ago. I’m the ninth.”
“Like Betty Crocker . . . ”
“Anonymity is a food reviewer’s greatest asset.”
“I feel stupid,” I said.
“My fault. I shouldn’t have assumed.”
“So if you’re not Lenora-Jo, what do I call you, then?”
“Miss Coffey, of course,” she winked, and raised her phone to eye level, urging me to face the camera as I faced away from the camera.
Best to interject here before upcoming events convey the wrong impression.
First off, I don’t want you to think that, as author and main character, I’m setting myself up to be some sort of James Bond or kinkster hunk from Fifty Shades of Grey. I have never been God’s gift to anybody. Notwithstanding the melodrama that contaminates my life, I embrace the humdrum. As a Certified Public Accountant by the name of Allison once said to me in the dying seconds of a slow-going evening of speed-dating, “Do you work at making yourself forgettable or does it come naturally?”
Governed by parentage, I sought to stay below the radar, even as the need to promote my business ramped up. I was store-brand vanilla with negligible aftertaste. I played up the ice cream, played down the maker. That’s not to say I came without features. I was self-sufficient, cooked, cleaned, made my bed most mornings. I knew the difference between a Phillips screwdriver and a Torx, a haymaker and a hook. I kept fit, no small feat considering my everyday proximity to fats and sugars. My life’s goal, however, was invisibility, which is why I ended up in ice cream.
The uniforms alone kept me out of the limelight. While Loony Scoops bypassed the sanitized dress whites, geeky bowties, and brimless garrison caps of days gone by, my theme of chocolate brown polo shirts, yellow-brown baseball caps, and pleated khakis still screamed castrato.
That said, and with respect to Lenora-Jo and the significant other soon to enter my life, I was a humble purveyor of frozen desserts—a career soda jerker—and, as history records, no man in my profession has ever had studmuffin and his name appear in the same sentence.
Dairy-driven romances have never captured anybody’s imagination, outside of a 4-H clubhouse.
Done with the photos, Lenora-Jo retrieved a spiral-bound notepad from her leather case and bade the show go on.
I was in my element, I tell you, my genius on display as I swapped my signature concoctions in and out, scoops and sundaes, milkshakes, floats and smoothies, cakes and cannoli, diligently ascribing the supernatural to each, as Lenora-Jo dipped and divined, quizzed and jotted, her tongue swirling, her chef-de-cuisine squint inscrutable, and confirmation of her Food Network training. She gave me nothing. Nary an ooo, ah, or yummo. She could make or break Loony Scoops and we both knew it.
“And this last?” she said. “What was it you called it?” Her tongue was slow to relinquish the spoon.
I circled out from behind the counter, settled onto the stool beside her. “Coco Rico.”
“Coco Rico?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, Crème d’Orgasme would be far more à propos, don’t you agree?” she said with a purr, and spun to rest her New Balance pinks on the edge of the stool, a toe-curl from my crotch. “Would you want to have dinner sometime?”
I acted as if this was normal. “What? Like a date?”
“Whatever works. Lunch. Coffee. Carousel in Congress Park. No pressure. Really. I just thought perhaps . . . ”
I was flattered, excited. An older woman wouldn’t be looking for either a commitment or my life story. A two-night stand at Ice Cream U was the last I’d come to anything resembling a relationship. The years before and the months since had seen a series of guarded, go-nowhere flirtations, underscored by my accustomed normal: horny, lonely, starved for intimacy, horny, lonely. You try carrying the baggage that was my father. See how far that gets you on the dating scene. Even by this standard, Lenora-Jo the Ninth was a non-starter. She was a reporter. I knew reporters. Dozens. Hundreds. Thousands. Newspaper reporters. Television reporters. www.bullshit.com and .net and .org and .wtf reporters. As inviting as she was, I would not risk it. “I’m sorry,” I said, loathing myself and my deep-seated paranoia. “I can’t.”
Her face fell, though she was quick to pick it up. “All good. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. My mistake. Sorry. I just thought . . . ”
“It’s not you,” I said. If we didn’t part on good terms, there was no telling the damage she could do. “It’s me.”
“Whatever.” She cut short a forced yawn and gauged the distance from her stool to the exit. I had embarrassed her.
“It’s just, you see, I was taught not to mix business with pleasure.”
“Funny, I’ve always believed business should be a pleasure.”
With my brain flailing north and my mouth flagging south, I blurted the blurt of all blurts: “It’s because you remind me of my mother.” Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit! Where the hell had that come from?
She winced, shuddered as she tried to contain it, but the laughter rushed out of her, crescendo upon crescendo of disbelief slapping me in the face. This was a good one. Best she’d ever heard.
In fact, she did not remind me of my mother. While the surrogate Lenora-Jo Coffey had plenty working in her favor, she was no Heather Blythe-Blessing. Who could be? On the other hand, if there was a surefire line to let a woman down easy, this had to be it. You remind me of my mother. A cockblock for the ages. Inspired!
“Look, I’m fine,” she said, gulping giggles as she packed up her belongings. “I’m a writer. Rejection comes with the job. I deal with little boys like you all the time. The loss is yours.” She beelined it to the door.
I backtracked to save my ass. “It’s not that I don’t like you.”
“Stop the whining. I’m a professional. I promise, I’ll be writing the puff piece of puff pieces. You’ll love it.”
“Much appreciated,” I said. “Really.”
“I would have been fine with the truth, you know. It just never occurred to me that you were . . . Well, I’m not the homophobic sort, if that’s what you’re worried about. But all your baloney, my God, what is wrong with you?”
I did not protest, did not attempt to refute her theory. It was perfect. I should have come up with it myself. The kicker was her question: “What is wrong with you?” I was grateful she didn’t hang around for my answer.
Leonora-Jo was true to her word. From the moment her write-up appeared in the Times Union, Loony Scoops boomed. “Most heavenly ice cream in the state and, dare I say, the country.” Folks came steadily and in droves. Halfway through my second year in business, Corinne Meredith Widdoes came too.