Kicking the Habit: I Scream, You Scream We all Scream at Ice Cream

Kicking the Habit

By PJ Creelman

The day after my seventeenth birthday, I—along with several of my high school classmates—traveled to Europe for my first time. The trip occurred the last time it was dangerous for Americans to travel abroad. We had a U.S. President who —right or wrong—was perceived as a trigger-happy, dangerous gun-slinging imperialist. (He wasn’t the first, and sadly, has proven to be not the last.)

Americans who willingly risked traveling abroad were easy to spot: Ostensibly, they looked like Americans, but had Canadian Flag patches sewn onto their backpacks.

One may ask: “How do you know they were Amurricans, and not Canajans?”

My answer comes in two parts…

1)      They didn’t sound like Canadians, eh? (Canadians use “Eh?” the way people from “The states” use “Y’know” and “huh?” Oh… and periods. They use them like periods. Furthermore, when Canadians speak Canadian, it sounds fluid and un-forced, bordering on the lingual equivalent of a fruit smoothie. When Ah-Murr-icans pretend to be Canajans, it sounds very forced. “We’re gonna go out and buy some unsweetened Iced Tea, aaaaayyyyy?!?” (As opposed to “Back-in-a-few, eh?”)

2)      The Canadians were all running around looking like smartly-dressed Americans, but they had Australian flags sewn to their backpacks.

Anyway, the first stop on the way to the European Continent was a few hours of layover in New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport.

Prior to the trip, my mom had painstakingly—through the auspices of AAA, our banks, foreign consulates and I think even some dabbling in international stock markets—arranged for me to possess roughly $20 in British, French, Swiss, and Austrian currency, as well as about $20 U.S. and much more in Deutschmarks, as Germany was the primary focus of our trip.

Armed with $20 and time to kill during my first (and to-date only) foray on the East Coast, I set out to find something uniquely “New York” (aside from a mugging.)

Our German teacher forbade us from leaving the airport. (This was fine with me, as I was jet-lagged, sleep-deprived, and ostensibly alone in a place that eats West-Coast-Dwellers for a late afternoon snack. (Given that it was late afternoon, I didn’t want to take any chances.))

I shambled through the airport, leaving our terminal (Twelve-B) in search of a way to spend money (Read: Entering Europe with holes burned into my pockets.)

The airport’s air conditioning was malfunctioning that day, creating a potentially lethal situation in early July on the Eastern Seaboard. At an international airport it created conditions that felt (and smelled) like a cross between an armpit covered in limburger cheese, and a crock pot filled with cabbage, broccoli and soy sauce.

My quest to find something “uniquely New York” quickly fizzled into a search for something cold, refreshing, and taxed locally to help the municipalities here.

I happened on a Häagen-Dazs Ice Cream shop and got in line behind my German Teacher.

The prices, while outrageous, were well within the boundaries of my cash-on-hand.

Three scoops of designer, brand-name ice cream and nine dollars later, I headed out of the swelteringly hot ice cream shop and made my back onto the swelteringly hot concourse, armed with a colorful assortment of chocolate, vanilla and chocolate chip mint ice creams.

As I exited the shop, I discovered a terrifying truth about the relationship between hot and humid weather, nonfunctional air conditioning and airport ice cream.

1)      Ice cream and hot, humid air do not play nicely. They don’t mix. (OK, the ice cream mixes… with itself, but this was not the desired result. I wanted the mixing to occur in my stomach.

2)      Ice cream had been melting, dripping and spilling all day long, all over travelers, vendors and muggers. All over tables, chairs and the floor.

While I traditionally do not walk on tables and chairs, I do frequently take the floor.

Now, to the credit of the Environmental Services employees at Kennedy International Airport in early July, 1986, on that hot and humid, sweaty-ice-cream day, they were proactively wiping down tables and chairs and were mopping the floors.

As I exited the ice cream shop, I immediately wished the Environmental Services cleaning staff had been slightly less proactive.

Let’s just say, as I hit the concourse, I hit the concourse. My tennis shoes hit the slickened floor and then, as gravity took over, so did the rest of me.

If those darned fastidious cleaners hadn’t been so darned proactive, I would have been fine because:

A)    The floor wouldn’t have been wet (read: slippery.)

B)    The floor would have, in fact, been sticky with all the ice cream drippings.

Either way, I now had an emergency appointment with terra firma (or: Concoursa-Firma). I reacted like any red-blooded American Teen-ager would, especially if this red-blooded teen didn’t like the sight of his own red blood. I squawked loudly, flailed my arms looking for a handhold, and fell anyway.

I need to take a moment to address the concept of “Squawking loudly.” There is a noise that I emit when I am startled or sincerely frightened. This noise can best be described as a cross between an eight-year-old girl screaming, and a cougar’s shriek.

I have tried repeatedly to duplicate this noise in times when I was not startled or sincerely frightened, but the results have been disappointing at best. Typically when I’m not frightened, I just sound like an intoxicated moose bellowing.

In this case, I flailed, gesticulating wildly, all the while sounding like a cougar pouncing on an eight-year-old girl.

Result: My carefully-crafted concoction of tri-colored, tri-flavored ice cream, no longer held in place by my grip, launched in a parabolic arc on a trajectory that would have made NASA proud.

In the words of the late Neil Armstrong: “That’s one small slip for a man, one giant messy spill for mankind.”

In my mind’s eye… well… my mind’s ear I could hear the “Splop-Splopp-Splurch!” of three scoops of ice cream attacking the patrons behind me.

To be honest, I was too busy fulfilling my appointment with the floor to notice the plight of my frozen dairy dessert.

For a half second, I expected my aerial ice cream assault to be followed by a hail of gunfire. Luckily for me, this was Kennedy Airport and not LAX.

I tried to recover, hoping to beat a hasty retreat to Gate 12-B before somebody caused me more bodily harm than that which I’d already experienced. As I started to extricate myself from the slick tiles, I heard a female shriek in a thick Nu Yawwk accent. (Expletives deleted to maintain a PG rating.)

“J---- C---- You F------ Son of a B-----!”

(OK, I’ll give you a hint, My Lord and savior was separated from my lineage by an F-Bomb.)

I turned to face a very angry-looking woman, covered head to toe in ice cream. She was dressed in a very dowdy black and white outfit.

My ice cream made her outfit look like a tribute to Salvador Dali and Jackson Pollock. There was chocolate on the white, vanilla on the black, and mint chocolate chip all over. At least I didn’t get strawberry!

The triple-threat of ice cream was roll-oozing down her body trying to cover the floor in another slip-proofing sticky extreme.

I stood transfixed, trying to match the complaint with the complainant. She looked infuriated, like she wanted to throttle me, or take a swing at me, or swing a throttle at me.

“I’m sorr… uh… Sorry… uhmmmm I’m sorry…”

Something registered in the back of my brain. Somewhere between cognizance and that “fight or flight” brain-stem response, there lies a small processor that plays and replays things, fitting pieces of the puzzle together at a reasonably high pace. It’s the part that says, “Hey, the shelf tag said $8.97, not $10.50,” and “Hey… the key chain in the ignition looks a lot like your…>>Slam<< …keychain.”

My processor was replaying the verbal body slam I’d just received.

It had put two and two together and got three scoops. It had seen black and white and got Jackson “Salvador Dali” Pollock. It had noticed that the source of the complaint was, if nothing else, unusual for the situation.

“Uhhh… you’re a nun,” I said.

She looked furious. Her face was a bright red… but there was a glimmer of recognition in her eye. Her hand went to cover her mouth. Her face faded from a bright red of rage to a… uh… bright red of embarrassment.

Of all the Ice Cream Joints in the world, I found the one that had some tough-as-nails Harlem Street Nun patrolling the concourse.

In her eyes there was now a look of shocked betrayal. Her eyes said Did those words come from my mouth?

Now I don’t know if she was a Nun-In-Training, or a rookie nun, or a grizzled veteran, or an undercover federal aviation agent. Because of this, I’ll never know how she interpreted what I said next…

“But, you’re forgiven,” I smiled.

Now, what I, the ice cream-deprived protestant teen in tennis shoes meant was, “God has forgiven you of your sins.”

She, the Undercover-Cop-Catholic-Gangsta-Harlem-Street-Nun, now adorned with a habit that had experienced a rare baptismal trifecta of chocolate/vanilla/mint chocolate chip, may have heard “I forgive you for taking the Lord’s name in vain after you began wearing nine-dollars-worth of designer ice cream.”

If that was the case, bless her heart.

There was a moment of silence.

“Is there any…” I started.

“No,” she finished.

“Are you cert…”

“Yes,” she said in a tone much icier than my formerly frozen dairy treat.

With that, I beat a hasty retreat in the direction of Gate 12-B. (There is no thirteenth gate. There’s 10, 11, 12-A, 12-B, 14, 15…etc. I wasn’t at gate thirteen, but by golly, I had the luck of Gate-13.)

My mind reeled. Was she a police officer, or security? A new convert? Mother Tourettes-sa? Was she an opportunist who immediately would grab herself a spoon and make the most of her nine-dollar ice cream bath?

I reached my terminal and pulled a novelization of the movie “Aliens,” in the hope of clearing my mind.

My German teacher—who had gotten away from the shop just moments ahead of my date dump with Mother Earth and Sister Siouxsie and the Banshees—was already seated at the ticket window, eating her treat.

Between licks of her Pralines-n-Cream cone, Frau Ross asked, “Where’s your ice cream?”

“Uhhhh…” I stammered… “Uhhh… I got nun of it.”

She looked at me for a moment before shrugging and continuing to devour her own semi-frozen dairy treat.