The morning of the day that my father serenaded the Good Humor lady with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a hundred foot power cord, and Iron Butterfly, the Mosquito Truck rumbled through our neighborhood, discharging a cloud of whitish-blue gas from the cannon-like machine propped on its cargo bed.
You could hear the eerie whine of the Mosquito Truck for ages before it got to us. Most of the neighborhood kids jumped on their bikes and rushed to dart through the clouds being shot out of the back of the truck, but not me or my sister Debbie. We heard the high hum; Debbie looked at me, playing with the idea of not being afraid. I hesitated, gripping my bike, the one with high handlebars and a banana seat, at the top of our absurdly long driveway.
I saw everyone else riding out to the road, jumping up and down curbs in anticipation of the lovely clouds. Debbie’s soft pixie haircut was as delicate as the tendrils of gas; something about her made me feel she needed protection. Last summer, she was in the house sick with strep throat, and from the glider on our swingset, I spied her looking forlornly through the glass of the sliding patio doors. Feeling big sisterly, I ran over to see her, lost my balance, and crashed through the glass. My father’s car was in the shop that day (he always drove old junkers, two tone Buicks with chrome dimples down the side and fat fins), so he had taken Mom’s Rambler wagon to work. Mom wrapped my head in towels and asked our neighbor to drive us to the doctor. Mrs. Hughes did, ignoring the blood threatening her car’s upholstery.
Years later, Mr. Hughes called the cops on Mom for not mowing our backyard. This was after my father had died, and I was away at college. The ride-on tractor he had been so proud of had long since seized up and was silently occupying half our garage. Mom was hiring a local kid to mow the front, but she couldn’t afford to pay him for the back, too. Debbie wasn’t usually around much. I came home from Rutgers the weekend after Mom got the summons. We had to rent a brush cutter from Adler’s Hardware to clear the meadow that had sprung up across the yard. Debbie came home while we were trying to get it started. She was always good with engines, if not school work. If Mom smelled the gin on her breath, she didn’t let on.
It was backbreaking work, the three of us taking turns pushing the engine through the brush. We got giggly after a while. Debbie drove a path one way, me another. Eventually, we ended up with islands of brush dotting the yard. We edged each with stones and branches from the far back, and an old log from the last apple tree to fall down from the orchard that was here before our houses took over, and declared the result a landscaping choice. The three of us collapsed in a heap of laughter, surveying our work of art. We looked over at the neighbors, daring them to call the authorities down on us again. They didn’t. It was the first time in years I’d seen Mom laugh so hard.
That earlier day, the one when I ran through the glass door, the yard was still pristine and acceptable. It took seven stitches to staunch the bleeding from my forehead, though Debbie remained untouched as the glass rained down around her.
As the mosquito truck came our way, I froze with temptation, but mom hustled us into the house before I could either plunge into the whitened air or play the protector. My bike dropped to the concrete, handlebar streamers trailing through a puddle from yesterday’s rain. Mom ran from window to window, shutting them as fast as she could. This vigilance came from dad; a chemical engineer (when he was employed), he seemed to be the only adult in town who knew that this sweet-smelling white cloud of smoke was most probably cancer-causing, so he’d given Mom strict instructions to get us inside and seal the house as fast as possible. Indoors, seeing everyone else outside whooping as they laced back and forth in the white haze, we felt kind of dopey and cowardly, but at the same time, utterly terrified that maybe we’d inhaled enough before we got in that we were about to die. Like some kind of Outer Limits episode, where the deadly gas sneaks into a tiny crack and fells the whole family, unsuspecting, helpless in their split level charnel-house.
Mom was not in the mood to indulge fantasies; things were getting a little tense in our house this summer. She wasn’t big on the idea of us getting ice cream every evening, either. Which was weird. It’s what everybody did.
Most kids carried money for their ice cream in their pockets. That’s what Debbie and me used to do. Lately, though, things had changed. We knew that the minute the Good Humor truck turned the corner onto our road, Dad would come out to personally buy us our treats. Most of the evening he’d spend reading trade journals or playing swing tunes on the piano (the soundtrack of our childhood), but he always came out just in time to buy us ice cream, just before the nine o’clock deadline, when the ice cream truck lights went out, and sales ended. We were the last stop on the route. I guess he heard the bells ringing, which I have to confess I look back to fondly whenever I hear the canned, singsongy recordings that ice cream trucks play now. There’s one that comes through the neighborhood we live in now which, for some completely unguessable reason, plays a minor-key, exotic, vaguely Middle-Eastern tune over and over—my nephew Jared, Debbie’s son, who moved in with us a couple years ago, calls it the Jihad Humor truck—I tell him don’t ever say that outside the house, it’s definitely sliding over to the offensive column.
One thing about my dad that I didn’t realize till much later is that treats always came with ulterior motives. We probably went to every liquor store in town with him at some time or another, but our favorite was the one that gave out Tootsie Rolls. Dad knew the people who worked in every store, and called them all “Coach,” as in, “Hi Coach, pour me a Pabst, have you met my kids?” Generally, both of us being on the shy side, we preferred to wait in the car. He was, each time, just running in for a moment. . He did the grocery shopping every Saturday afternoon, and always brought us along. There was a liquor store attached to the supermarket, so he sometimes stopped there for a beer after shopping. This store had the neatest fountain in one corner, a huge fake rock leaning against the wall with rivulets of water running down it to a pool below, with a low rim where we could sit and watch the water and the colored lights shining from tiny crevices in the “stone” and wait for Dad to finish his drink. We made up stories about some kind of miniature exotic world in there, a race of tiny people living in the stone, turning off and on their garish lights behind the curtain of water.
But the big treat was the trip to Harmony Bowl. So I guess I should mention here that I never picked up a bowling ball till years and years later, and never with my dad. No, the reason for visiting Harmony Bowl each Saturday afternoon was totally tactical; it was a place where Dad could plant us at the snack bar with milkshakes while he got in a good long visit to the real bar, knowing that we were all inside one building and therefore safe to be left to our own devices, which mostly consisted of drinking our milkshakes, inspecting the underside of the counter for dried up blobs of used chewing gum (God knows why we found that fascinating) and playing hide and seek among the tables and bowling ball-holding walls at the tops of the lanes, probably annoying the hell out of the actual, you know, bowlers. Inevitably, we’d get bored, or in trouble, and then we’d play the game of, you go in and get him. I wanted Debbie to go in; she was littler and cuter, but being older and supposedly more responsible, it was usually me. The room seemed underwater dark except for the glow of the beer signs and the television at the end of the bar (farthest from the door, of course) where I’d find Dad. He never acted angry when I came in, introduced me to some guy named Coach, finished his beer and whatever inning it was, and got up to take us home
This particular summer Dad had a job, which made things a little smoother than some. The month before, we’d even rented a cabin at a lake in the northwest corner of the state, something we didn’t normally do. I liked roughing it; there was a bucket in the bathroom, and a hose stuck through a crack in the floor. You filled the bucket with the hose, then dumped it down the toilet bowl to flush. There was no bathtub or shower, so we brought soap and shampoo down the hill to the lake. None of the walls went all the way to the ceiling. We shared the cabin with two aunts and a bunch of cousins; the fathers all worked and just came for the weekend. Dad and I played double solitaire on the porch on a table of peeling green paint. He taught me how to dive; it’s the only summer I’ve ever been able to. Something about my low center of gravity.
We were there for Fourth of July; we had sparklers and watched fireworks going off at the country club across the lake. Later that night, I heard mice scrabbling across the floor under our beds, and my parents having some kind of mumbled argument on the pull-out sofa outside our door. I was afraid he’d lost another job, but apparently not, because when we got home, he went back out to work Monday morning just like usual.
That Monday was the first time the Good Humor lady came. In June, it had been this shy, dark-haired high school kid whom I’d had a half-realized crush on. So I kind of resented her driving his truck. She wasn’t sure why he was being replaced, but it worked out for her because her summer camp job had fallen through and she needed tuition money for next fall. We found all this out in about a minute after she pulled up—she was a talker, rambling on while she handed out ice cream and made change. I’d been standing in our front yard, out of breath from a game of “TV tag” (if you were about to get tagged, you could crouch down and call out a name of a TV show to avoid the tag, another version was “Cigarette tag”). I had just become IT—some advice: don’t ever try to say “Courtship of Eddie’s Father” if every second counts. I made my way over to the truck, but hung back because she was not Philip, listening but not buying anything.
“Made up your mind yet? It’s almost nine. You know I have to turn the lights out.” I fished out the quarter I’d wrangled Mom into giving me and got a Chocolate Éclair, savoring the gob of dark candy which always clung to the bottom of the stick. Coming in that night, I mentioned to my parents that Philip was gone, and there was an ice cream lady now. Mom, proto-feminist that she was, thought that was great, and thoroughly approved of her attending Monmouth College and studying biology. Mom was a great believer in education. I hoped that meant more quarters.
The next night, Dad “forgot” to hand out quarters after dinner. I heard him through the front door, playing Gershwin on our baby grand, rocks glass of bourbon on the lid, while we played kickball on the lawn. Home plate was the scraggly yellow rose bush just by the door; sliding in was not advised. I still connect that aluminum tang of a front door screen to the sound of piano notes in August.
When Patty pulled onto the street, I went running over, but about halfway there I realized I didn’t have any money. I turned, and saw my father coming out, ambling over like it was the most normal thing in the world, still in his white office shirt and bow tie, glass in his hand, cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He walked up to me and Debbie, handed us our quarters, said howdy to Patty, and wandered home again. When we got home with our ice cream, he was back at the piano, Mom was in a chair by the window reading an Agatha Christie mystery, and we headed upstairs to change into our babydoll pajamas and go to bed. It was a hot night, and if they argued, the window fan in our room drowned it out.
So the pattern set in—the truck would roll around the corner, we’d run over, Dad would meet us with money, make some small talk, and we’d head home for the night.
Our neighborhood group was a wide mixture of ages. Mostly elementary school kids, but sometimes the older brothers, one from two houses down, one from up around the corner, would deign to grace our gatherings with their presence. They rarely spoke to us or their younger siblings who were there. One of them, Martin, went to the local high school, but the other, a skinny, pale, long-haired kid named Glen, was considered some kind of genius and went to a private school a couple towns away, the kind of school whose name started with “The.” So we hardly knew him at all.
Their claim to fame was an incident the previous Halloween, when, instead of waking up to the usual Mischief Night pranks of toilet paper festoons or smashed eggs, we and our neighbors were greeted by an enormous peace sign hung from the telephone pole on the corner. Dad, despite being at this point in his life a pro-business Republican, thought it was funny. Mom worried that they could have gotten hurt. Mom was the liberal in the family, but also the worrier. Several years later, Glen failed out of NYU and ended up in Vietnam. By then she was past worrying, or so inured to it that the news of his injuries hardly fazed her, though she made sure to bring a casserole up to their house after she got off from work..
I’m not exactly sure why Martin and Glen decided that Patty needed to hear “Inna
Gadda Da Vida”—looking back, I think they were trying to impress the older college woman with their mostly-from-books knowledge of counter culture and psychedelic music. I think she was more of the Beatles type, too busy working and getting through school to worry about how cool she was. Martin would be trying to smooth down his Brillo brush long hair, tucking it behind his ears every two minutes to have it spring back almost right away in a wiry pyramid around his head; I can imagine him saying something about listening to the record playing down in Glen’s basement, smoky from candles and incense. If she wanted, she could come down and listen with them after nine? (Ever hopeful, those adolescent males.) She would have laughed, explained she couldn’t leave her truck unattended, it wasn’t worth losing her job over. It would’ve been Glen’s very quiet, intense idea, then: “Hey man, we could play it out here.”
It’s hard to remember in these days of CDs, boomboxes and ipods how difficult it was to just play music outside. Radios, sure, but they weren’t going to just pick up the stereo system with its four foot speakers, receiver, and turntable and set it up in the street. That’s when Dad spoke up, volunteering the reel-to-reel tapedeck with built in speakers that was gathering dust on a shelf in our basement, leftover from some alcoholic buying binge, some dream of recording and playing back his piano bits, from a couple years ago. The boys could take it that night, record the song (all seventeen minutes) the next day, and Dad would rig a hundred foot extension cord from our house, down the long concrete driveway, to the tapedeck, set up under our mailbox.
Glen and Martin were somewhat startled to have their moment interrupted by the old guy, but, on the other hand, they were otherwise stumped as to how to make this proceed. Martin mumbled a quick “Hey, man, that’s cool” and that was that. Somehow, we’d gotten beyond why Patty needed to hear Inna Gadda Da Vida, to how, very quickly. Most everyone but Martin, Glen, Debbie, Dad, and I had gone home by then. Patty waved goodbye, flipped off the sidelights of the truck, and drove away. We went home, no light left in the sky by now. Mom wanted to know why we were out so long; Dad said something about a big crowd, and Debbie and I didn’t have a clue how to explain in any more detail what the talk at the ice cream truck had been about. We were more into Bobby Sherman than the Beatles, never mind Iron Butterfly. We were uncomfortable, and didn’t know why. Mom would hear the music tomorrow night, anyway. It would hardly stay a secret.
The next night unwound pretty much as expected. Martin and Glen brought the tapedeck back with the song recorded, Dad strung the cord out the garage, down our driveway, to the street. Mom watched but refused to ask why. All evening, I was weirdly attuned to the sound of every car coming up the street. The blue post-sunset light glowed differently, to me. I had a feeling of vague, exciting but scary possibilities, that there was a world of people trying new things, hearing new music, turning onto unmarked roads. Our development sat in a bowl of tree-covered hills; you couldn’t see far in any direction. Once, on an episode of Astroboy, an entire town had been spirited to another planet, to wake up in houses identical to their own, and had assumed at first that Earth was still beyond the horizon they could see. When I watched it, earlier that summer, the idea had terrified me; I had gone outside, looked at that bowl of hills surrounding us, and thought “that could happen, that could be true right now.” Tonight, though, that same idea didn’t seem so scary. I turned it over on my tongue, and thought, imitating Glen, way cool, man.
So, like I said, things started out the way they were planned. The truck finally appeared, bells ringing as it rounded the corner to our street. The usual crowd came over, and Patty casually handed out ice cream and made change and small talk. Glen and Martin waited by the tapedeck for the kids to take their ice cream and leave, though a few insisted on lingering to see what was going on. Dad had come out as soon as she appeared, but stood to the side, hands in his pockets, the glow of his cigarette brightening in the receding light. We ran over to him, like always, and waited for our quarters. But when he pulled out his hands, all he had was a couple dimes.
“Looks like I forgot to check for change,” he said, adding a hearty chuckle like it was no big deal. We could hardly believe it—this was outside the realm of the possible; he was out there for us, wasn’t he? Debbie started to cry, but rather than joining in, I shushed her. Perplexed as I was, I didn’t want to lose that blue twilight feeling I’d had. “We’ll make him buy us two tomorrow, okay?” She wasn’t mollified; it wasn’t about the ice cream, and she knew it. Comprehension crossed her face, and I knew she was discovering something, taking a new knowledge from this moment that would stay with her the rest of her life, long after he’d died.
At that moment, the song started. I’ve listened to it a hundred times since, the eerie scribbles of electric organ, sometimes in a continuous line, sometimes raining down in harsh droplets. The classic rock baseline; the dense, frayed voice; and of course that drum solo, all five minutes of it. I can still drum it out on a table if I think about it long enough. What odd sounds to roll out across a late sixties New Jersey suburb, coating the night with a dangerous substance which filled the mailboxes, brushed across the grass, crept through the screens. We all just stood, let it flow around us, as the night grew dark. Everything was still when it finally ended, then Dad flipped his lighter open, lit another cigarette, and walked over to the truck, to say goodnight, or something.
Patty was not in the cab. She was standing on the street side, with Glen and Martin. There was a low giggling coming from them, and I realized that they’d lit something, too. For some reason, this upset Dad. He stared at them, frown lines deepening across his Nixon-style M-shaped forehead. Patty met his eyes, then slid hers over to Martin, who started to laugh uproariously. Glen’s eyes just narrowed; he didn’t laugh, but said, in a courtly way, “Thanks, Mr. Miller, for the help. This was wild, wasn’t?” Dad didn’t answer, just lifted the tapedeck and started back toward the house, the extension cord doubling up behind him. Debbie and I picked up loops and pulled it in as we followed.
We went into the house. Mom was in the living room, book unopened beside her.
“So, was it fun? Were the kids impressed?” Not clear what kids she was referring to—us, the high school kids, the college girl? Dad didn’t say much, poured a glass of bourbon, sat on the piano bench. Five years later, the cancer that he’d be diagnosed with that fall, shortly after being laid off from another job for coming in too late one morning after a night in which he’d nicked eight parked cars before getting home, would kill him. And I’d be lying on that piano bench, half a floor above the front hallway in a balconeyish alcove bordered by wrought iron railings, breathing in the thick mahogany scent, when my mom came through the door to tell us.
But that was the future, and this night, Glen still had two legs, Debbie hadn’t yet worked out what betrayals she’d been introduced to, and I was still skating on the wild possibilities of the evening. Mom opened her book, and Dad’s hands settled over the yellow ivory keys, found “Moonlight Serenade,” and held tight to it to keep from drowning.
Leslie Doyle resides in Bloomfield, New Jersey. She has been published in the Alternative Review, the Wisconsin Review, and some others. She teaches writing and environmental issues at Bloomfield College. Her interests include kayaking, biking, and being at the Jersey Shore, and is working on her first novel.
I THOROUGHLY ENJOYED THIS STORY. IT IS WONDERFUL THAT PEOPLE CAN REMEMBER THINGS ABOUT THEIR CHILDHOOD AND INCORPORATE THEM IN A FICTIONAL STORY.IT ALSO BRINGS BACK MEMORIES TO OTHERS THAT READ THIS.
That was a rich trip down memory lane. The particulars were a little different but I’m almost certain the same mysterious underpinnings were being realized, simultaneously in Hunterdon County …Thank you.