Snow Job, part 1

In my February 3rd posting, I mentioned that I spent the summer of 1985 driving a snow cone truck. This prompted my friend Leesh to send me the following e-mail message:

Subject: Even not still waters run deep

Joey, you are a man of eternal mystery. I had no idea that you drove a sno-cone truck in ‘85! George suggests that some “slight illegality and a lesbian” might have been involved.

— Leesh

In order to satisfy my dear friend’s curiosity and as a ploy to garner more votes for the Anti-Bloggies competition, I’ve decided to tell the story of that lovely summer.

Please note that I’ve changed all the names save mine to protect the innocent. Actually, that not true: I’ve changed the names save mine to protect my sorry ass.

The Satanist

When you’re a spiky-haired seventeen-year-old with a driver’s license, summer seems so full of promise. That’s the way it seemed to me back in 1985, literally half a lifetime ago. It was less than a week into summer vacation when I was sitting by a pool where my classmate Antonio was a lifeguard. It was only just past the middle of June and the humidity made it feel like the dog days of August.

“Please,” Antonio said, looking at the sky, which couldn’t seem to settle on being sunny or cloudy, “rain, willya?”

Aside from the creepy guy doing laps in the pool, Antonio and I were the only people there. If it rained, Antonio would be able to close the pool and call it an early afternoon. I remember that we were planning to go to Club Z, an all ages alternative music dance club on St. Joseph Street that evening and that Antonio wanted the afternoon off so that he could do something — I don’t recall what — prior to clubbing.

We sat and watched the clouds start to dissipate.

“C’mon, God! A little rain here!” he yelled at the sky.

Creepy Guy saw this and emerged from the pool. He was a good head taller than I was, with a very lanky build and long black hair. I’d say he looked like Trent Reznor, but at that time Trent was just an unknown musician working at a keyboard store in Cleveland.

“That’s not how it’s done.” said Creepy in a basso prundo voice.

“How’s it done then?” asked Antonio.

“Like this.” He raised his arms at an angle to the sky, his fists clenched. “Oh mighty Satan…”

Mighty Satan?

“Oh Prince of Darkness, I, your humble servant implore you to make it rain!”

Oh great, I thought, Creepy Guy’s probably going to offer us as a sacrifice to his dark lord.

He saw the looks on our faces and merely smiled. “Just wait and see,” he said, as he left the pool.

“He probably peed in the pool. Devil worshippers treat pee like holy water.” I said.

Less than half an hour later, I grabbed a newspaper to shield myself from the sudden downpour. Antonio quickly locked up the pool and we made a made dash for his car.

“That…was…weird”, said Antonio once we were inside the car, shaking the water from his afro.

“You should find another job.” I said. “Speaking of jobs…”

I still had the newspaper — The Toronto Sun — in my hands. The outer pages were soaked, but the inside pages were still relatively dry. I turned to the help wanted section. The only ad that seemed even remotely interesting read something like this:

HAWAIIAN SNOW
Make money selling frozen treats – bonuses!
Must have drivers license
Vehicle provided
High school students welcome
Orientation session tomorrow

I thought it would be worth checking out.

The Boss

The orientation session was held in a warehouse clear across town, in Scarborough, or as we like to call it, Scarberia. The warehouse was full of clothing racks from which evening dresses were hanging. I thought that perhaps I’d gone to the wrong address when I saw a man in a Hawaiian shirt and Jams (a brand of very loud Hawaiian shorts popular in the 80’s) giving a lecture to people who looked about my age.

“Remember,” he said, “it’s not a snow cone. That’s a trademarked term. This is shaved ice. We are Hawaiian Snow. There’s a difference. Snow cones are granular; you make them by crushing ice. Shaved ice you make by shaving ice very finely, so it’s just like snow.”

He took a block the size of a large shoebox and placed it into a large compartment inside a large white machine. He turned a crank and then stepped on a foot pedal. The machine made loud whirring sounds as it spun the block of ice in place. Shavings came out the bottom of the machine; he caught them with a cup. He stopped when the cup was full, took a bottle of blue liquid, squirted some into the cup and passed it around. It was like snow, and the blue stuff tasted like pineapple.

“I poured the wrong food colouring in that bottle. All the flavourings are clear. The colour’s just for effect.”

While we we passed the cup of shaved ice among ourselves, Barry — the guy giving the lecture — told us the story of Hawaiian Snow. Barry was originally from Montreal and had moved to Toronto a couple of years prior to help his uncle run a store that sold overstocked or discontinued designer dresses in a chi-chi Toronto neighbourhood called Yorkville. That explained the dresses in the warehouse. He went on to tell a story about how he’d seen street vendors in Califonia selling shaved ice, tried some, got hooked and became convinced that he could start a lucrative business selling shaved ice in Toronto.

“These machines cost almost a thousand dollars each and they came all the way from Japan,” he bragged, as if it were some land of mystical appliances and not the same country that my Walkman came from.

“If you have a valid drivers license with a clean driving record and if you pass the test, you can have a job selling Hawaiian Snow this summer! We pay seven bucks an hour, and you get all the shaved ice you can eat!”

Seven bucks an hour. That was almost three bucks above minimum wage back then. Fifty-six bucks a day. To my seventeen-year-old mind, that was serious money.

The Test

I waited for a while to be tested, since I was near the end of the line to Barry’s office, where he was administering the test. Most of the people coming out of the office at the end of their tests went straight out the warehouse’s main door; only a few returned to the area where Barry was delivering the orientation lecture. I assumed they had passed. What kind of test was he giving?

My turn came up. I entered Gary’s office and sat in a chair opposite him and a tall blonde woman who was obviously his girlfriend or wife. He looked at the form I’d filled out earlier.

“Seventeen. A little young…” he said.

“I have a driver’s license,” I said, in a tone of voice that tried to suggest that I was mature for my age.

“Here’s your test,” said the blonde woman. “I buy something from you. It costs $1.67 with tax. I give you a two dollar bill.” (This was back when we still had two-dollar bills.) “How much change should you give me?”

“Thirty-three cents,” I replied quickly. Duh.

“Congratulations,” said Barry, reaching to shake my hand. “You passed.”

The Tools of the Trade

The ice shaving machine was a large white machine a little large than one of those restaurant-grade KitchenAid mixers and had a shape similar to an espresso machine. Its upper half was a compartment into which you placed the ice. To load the machine, I would slide open the compartment’s transparent door and place a shoeboxed-sized block of ice into the compartment. Using a handle on the side of the machine, I would lower the shaver’s drive axle until its spikes penetrated the ice block. I would then slide the compartment door shut. At that point, the shaver was ready for operation.

The machine was operated by a foot pedal. Stepping on it would start the shaver’s motor, which would spin the ice block counterclockwise within the compartment. The bottom of the compartment had a blade which would shave the ice; the shavings fell from the bottom of the compartment into the open area beneath it, just as coffee comes from the upper compartment of an espresso machine.

I would catch the shaved ice in a paper cone as it fell from the bottom of the ice compartment, packing it gently with gloved hands. When the cone was filled to its rim, I’d continue to shave more ice and pack it into a ball on top of the cone. This would continue until a baseball-sized snowball sat on top of the cone.

After the snowball was complete, it was time to pour unnaturally-coloured, unnaturally flavoured syrups onto the snowball. Unlike snow cones (which, as you may recall are made of crushed ice), the syrup didn’t rush to the bottom of the cone and collect in a pool. The snow-like shaved ice did a good job of holding the syrup like a sponge. There were about a dozen different flavours to choose from and there wasn’t any arbitrary limit to the number of flavours customers could ask to have put on their shaved ice. If I was feeling artistic and had the time, I’d paint the customer’s cone with some kind of design. I’d make Pac-Man, Batman and Superman cones for the kids, and I once impressed a couple of art students visiting from Connecticut by making them Mondrian and Seurat cones.

The other machine that we were provided was a microwave. The other item we sold were teriyaki hot dogs, which someone would barbecue every morning. The hot dogs and buns would be stored in the ice

The problem with our machines was that they needed electricity to run. This is a problem for a street vendor; the streets of Toronto don’t have convenient power outlets at every corner. The solution was to provide each vendor with a Honda portable gas generator. Essentially a lawnmower engine attached to an electrical dynamo with two standard three-prong power outlets at the end, it weighed over a hundred pounds and sounded like an idling moped when little demand was being placed on it. When we stepped on the footswitches of our ice shavers, the generator’s sound became much louder, sounding more like a lawn tractor at maximum speed. Needless to say, it didn’t endear us to the shopkeepers around our stands.

All our equipment fit into our carts, which were custom-built kitchen counters on wheels. The carts had nooks specially designed to hold the microwave oven, cash box, a cooler for the ice blocks, the syrup bottles and some personal stuff. The shaver was put on top of the counter so that customers could see the shaved ice being made. It was believed that making shaved ice would draw a lot of spectators, and hopefully, customers.

In oder to cart all this stuff about, we were each provided with a bottom-of-the-line white Toyota pickup truck. All our equipment and a large cooler that could hold 50 or so blocks of ice fit in the back. The truck had a piddly little 1-point-something-small litre engine, so it was a struggle to climb steep hills when it was fully loaded. We were allowed to take the trucks home at night and since gas was covered by the company, they became our personal vehicles for the entire summer.

I’m still amazed that he trusted so much stuff to a seventeen year-old.

Next: The fun begins!