Chasing the Ice-Cream Truck

Mike Ramm

Disclaimer: Characters in this essay have been fictionalized. Any resemblance to actual people is coincidental.

The Wednesday morning sky was diseased. The pall of smoke from the fire burning in the American River watershed was thick, and the rising sun looked like an infected sore. I was standing near the science building before the start of the school day, talking to a fellow teacher, telling him about the wildfire that was burning in my mind. Amanda Johnston, a former student, had been arrested. It was reported in the crime log of this morning’s newspaper, and I was still reeling from the news. Amanda-–so sensitive and so idealistic, not to mention incredibly artistic--now accused of elder abuse? How was that even possible? In Amanda’s senior yearbook I remember writing You are a credit to your generation. Before she graduated she gave me a framed print of one of her black and white photos: a child blowing a dandelion.

My colleague then added more fuel to the fire by exclaiming that teachers can never know what kind of adult their students will turn themselves into. “Did you know Leah Lawson?” he asked in a way that presaged my day was about to become even more surreal. I did know Leah. I had her as a junior. She and her family took a mid school year vacation to Disney World. As a thank-you for providing her the homework in advance, Amanda gave me a Winnie the Pooh souvenir mug. “Well,” he said, the air heavy with smoke, heavy with the dread of what he was about to say, “her younger sisters tells me she’s now an exotic dancer in Vegas.”

“Not the future I would’ve predicted for her,” I said.

“There was another student,” my colleague continued. “He graduated ten years ago. Derrick Fischer. Remember him? A valedictorian, but now he’s in the county jail for vandalizing an elementary school.”

I responded with another exclamation of dismay, but then I broke away, needing to prepare for the school day ahead. I had lesson plans to finalize and scores to enter into the grade book. I also had to pick the question of the day and write it on the board. It was a classroom practice of mine to choose an appropriate question, usually from David Stockwell’s The Book of Questions, and write it in the upper left hand corner of the white board. Then all school day long students would, if so inclined, write their responses, clarifying their values in the process. Basically an old fashioned discussion board. Here’s the question I chose that morning: For an all-expense-paid vacation anywhere in the world, would you be willing to kill a rare and beautiful butterfly by pulling off its wings?

Flash forward to my last class of the day, a group of spirited freshmen, mostly girls, whose energy and enthusiasm made me think I had interrupted a slumber party. “A bouncy class,” a substitute teacher once observed of them. I promised my students an interesting period. First read and discuss Sandra Cisneros’s coming of age novel The House on Mango Street then go out and buy ice-cream. Our physics teacher, you see, was conducting his annual acceleration lab, directing his students to calculate the acceleration of a genuine ice-cream truck driven by a genuine ice-cream man. Afterward, any class was welcome to come out and purchase ice-cream.

To read The House on Mango Street is to look at the world through innocent eyes. Esperanza, the young and naïve narrator, is curious about growing up, but, unlike many of the neighborhood kids her age, she stubbornly holds on to childhood. In one chapter, for example, Esperanza is devastated when the same overgrown vacant lot which is to her an Edenic playground becomes the place where her friends are now making out. In class that afternoon we read the chapter My First Job in which Esperanza’s aunt finds her underaged niece a job at a place called Peter Pan’s Photo Finishers. On her first day at work, Esperanza’s coworker, a fifty year old man, asks her for a birthday present: a kiss on the cheek. When the unsuspecting Esperanza leans in, he grabs her face and kisses her on the mouth. One of the few guys in the class, Ryan, pointed out the irony of Esperanza being molested in a place associated with Peter Pan, molested, in a sense, in Neverland.

Molested in Neverland!

It was then I began to realize the synchronicity of this fiery day. What irresistible force drove Derrick out of his Neverland and turned him into a destructive man? Did an invading horde sack Leah’s Neverland and then sell her into slavery to a strip joint in Vegas? Was there a horrible old molester in Amanda’s past who evicted her from her Neverland, embittering her to the point where she was capable of abusing a helpless elder? There are butterflies in Neverland, a vision of beauty and delicacy, a source of wonder and awe. Judging by my students’ responses to the question of the day, however, Neverland was ripe for exploitation.

–“Yes. It’s only a creepy butterfly.”

–“Yes. They’re rare, not extinct.”

–“Yes. Sadly I’d have to say I would. I’d feel guilty but get over it while touring Paris.”

The ice-cream truck wasn’t where we were told it would be! It wasn’t parked by the science building. It wasn’t parked in the lower campus parking lot. We searched and searched. Though the heat was oppressive, though the smoky air burned in our throats, my freshman would not let me abandon the quest. Have you seen the ice-cream truck they asked our campus security officer. Have you seen the ice-cream truck they asked faculty and fellow students alike. To no avail. The ice-cream truck just wasn’t on campus anymore, and it was a tired, hot, and terribly disappointed group of children I was leading back to the classroom. “Wait!” cried Marti, as we were passing the library. “I hear the ice-cream truck. I hear his song. Listen!”

“That’s just music from the band hall,” cried Heather, the sadness in her voice so palpable.

We trudged those last few steps back to the classroom, and as my young students filed in and settled back into their desks, my thoughts were bleak. Who among you, I wondered, would become vandals or abusers? How long before the wings are pulled off the rare and fragile butterfly that is your innocence? Neverland fades. The music of the ice cream man fades. His truck will never stop for you again. It was then that Kelsey burst into the room. “I found him!” she cried breathlessly. I found the ice-cream man!! I had to throw myself in front of the truck to get him to stop. But he stopped! He’s waiting! C’mon!! Let’s go!!”

My freshmen didn’t even bother to ask for my permission. Into the hazardous air they rushed, the sun burning like a torpedoed ship in an oily sea, the music of the ice-cream truck now playing in the distance.