Ah, the giant lime sherbet ice cream foot with the gumball embedded in the big toe. Absolutely glorious. The epitome of summertime, the apex of all human existence. It’s anatomically accurate (maybe a size eight, male), and it melts wondrously in the midday sun, as you regulate your body temperature, indulge your junk food craze, and satisfy your shamefully hidden foot fetish simultaneously.
The Ice Cream Man doesn’t have it.
“No, that’s expensive, man,” explains Mahmoud Rabah, a cheerful Jordanian Palestinian in his late twenties who has graciously offered us the shotgun seat on his ice cream truck. We thank him, and forgive him. For instead, Mahmoud has Chocolate Èclairs, Strawberry Shortcakes, Malt Cups, Tear-Jerkers, Coconut Crazies, Watermelon Pops (with edible seeds!), Frozen Snickers bars, and enormous popsicles shaped like Spiderman, Dora the Explorer, Bugs Bunny, etc. Super Mario (of Nintendo fame) is particularly popular.
As is Mahmoud. He is the Ice Cream Man. He brings joy to the masses, combining the best traits of Santa Claus, Robin Hood, and Jesus. Everyone loves him, and everyone lines up on the street in droves to purchase his frozen wares and stave off the sweltering summer heat.
Except today is rainy, overcast, crappy. Decidedly not sweltering. The sun does not make an appearance. The streets appear to be deserted. And Mahmoud, despite being his own boss, setting his own hours, and driving around in a giant van full of ice cream confections, is having a lousy day, one he certainly does not deserve.
“I like this one,” he says, handing us a comically oversized bomb pop. “It’s good to make money with it, and also it looks like the American flag. It’s good flavor, too. A lot of people like this one, and a lot of people like the Chocolate Banana.”
Predictably, he’s sold more quasi-flag Popsicles than usual in the wave of post-September-11-and-Iraq-walloping patriotism. There is just cause for optimism that this trend will continue as Mahmoud rolls his truck through the streets of Hayward, where both man and truck sleep — the truck on a lot with maybe fifteen other individually owned vehicles, and the man with his wife and three children (two girls, one boy, ages five, four, and one). Monday through Friday (he devotes weekends to his family), Mahmoud gasses up his truck, loads the freezer with goodies stocked on the lot, and gets the hell outta Hayward. Drives clear across the San Mateo Bridge into San Francisco.
He used to peddle his wares in the East Bay, back when he started doing this in ’97. Those days are over, for two very specific reasons: A) too many trucks in too small an area, and B) the threat of physical violence.
“If I’m in Oakland or Hayward or San Leandro, people no say hi,” Mahmoud says. “People make bad language, maybe give me fingers. Not because I am bad, giving them a hard time, but because they’re bad.”
Robust young scamps have thrown rocks at him, with one even breaking his windshield. The “take the ice cream and run without paying for it” technique also has been employed. Certainly not every Oakland resident is scheming to set his business aflame, but Mahmoud clearly has had enough. He responds to the old urban legend that you can buy drugs out of ice cream trucks with just three words: “Maybe in Oakland.”
So now he roams hostility-free Pacifica and South San Francisco, quietly playing the sweetest, most generous Ice Cream Man in history. “It’s very fun,” he says. “I work with my customers like a friend, like a brother. I treat the kids like my children. If this kid doesn’t have the icey cream that he wants, I feel sad, I give to him for free.”
He’s not kidding. Mahmoud also sells candy — Gummy Pizzas and the like — but most of it he casually gives away to any kid under ten who buys anything. If it costs a buck, he’ll take ninety cents or less if that’s all you got; he’ll take a dollar if it’s $1.25. Lifeguards at the beach get discounts, as do kids who buy in bulk for their friends. One Pacifica kid, a regular customer, gets a free Dad’s Root Beer Creamsicle (fabulous, by the way) after he says that rent troubles are forcing his family to move, again. For every five bucks Mahmoud makes, he gives up about three in free or discounted merchandise. He’s a pushover, a saint with sweets. Even when his day is a catastrophe.
First, the weather. “Nobody knows about this weather,” he says. “Only God knows about this weather.” Even by San Francisco standards, it blows. The sky is gray, the air frigid, the streets deserted. Mahmoud breathes a sigh of relief when he finally makes his first sale: a package of sunflower seeds, two Frozen Snickers bars, and a Sprite. To one guy. “He likes to eat, or maybe he has a friend with him,” Mahmoud muses.
He drives along the beach, past school buses full of kids frolicking in the surf, reminding him of childhood vacations to the Dead Sea (Mahmoud moved to America at sixteen, working odd jobs in New Jersey before shipping out West in ’96). But even the patriotic bomb pop is wooing few suitors today. A tactical error further depletes morale: We show up at the elementary school he likes to hit every day, but the first two kids who approach inform Mahmoud that classes let out at noon today. It is 1:30 p.m. Curses.
So we drive for long hours on suburban streets that unfold like ghost towns — often not a person in sight. Eighty percent of the people poking around outdoors end up buying something, but that’s not enough to boost morale. This is really starting to bum Mahmoud out.
“I am tired and sick of icey cream,” he says. “You think I am liking this job too much? If someone coming to buy my truck today, I sell it to them.
“I get bored sometimes when weather like that. I see big long day for me. I’m drivin’ on the street, no talking, no nothing.
“Look, houses left and right, and no people. It’s very sad, huh. Too many houses and people no coming outside.
“Maybe this season my last season. Maybe I sell my truck, maybe go different job. I work in the street. Weather no good. No people coming outside. I miss the school today. What am I gonna do?”
Suddenly, he brightens. “But I believe God never forgets me. I happy when the people coming by. I feel like, ‘Oh, I’m working now. I’m gonna pay my bills now. I’m gonna buy some diapers, some clothes.'”
There’s literally no middleman here — Mahmoud owns the truck outright. He bought it from a friend when it was still a seven-passenger luxury van: leather seats, lush red exterior, TV/VCR. He ripped out the seats, bought freezers and a converter to power them, and had the outside painted white and inundated with stickers. He even bought a small sound system, enough to blast the first six bars of Beethoven’s “Für Elise” out into the ether, over and over again (“I got used to it,” he explains). Mahmoud also has a second option: a weird sound effect piece that begins with a cheery “Hello!” before devolving into a psychotic blend of keyboard beeps and chicken squawking. He only plays it a few times — everyone outside within hearing range is visibly alarmed.
Total cost for the truck, its contents, and its fanfare: $5,000.
“I don’t work for nobody,” he says. “I am my own boss. I don’t have no boss telling me to do that or do this.” He doesn’t work if it rains. And he can hypothetically take a day off whenever he damn well pleases. But he really can’t. He sells between $40 and $60 worth of merchandise a day, and as he buys the ice cream in bulk, about half is pure profit, so his immediate take-home pay is $20 to $30 a day, which doesn’t even factor in gas and other mechanical issues. One day he sold $200 and took home $100: Christmas in July. Or November — Mahmoud works all year round, though the weather gets even more enigmatic in the winter.
Bottom line: He takes it, and feels it, very personally when no one will buy a goddamn Chocolate Banana. Financial reality keeps intruding into our little éclair-dealing reverie. At one point Mahmoud stops the truck so he can grab a sheet with rental information on a small, extremely modest house for sale. He takes one look and drops the sheet in our lap as though it’s on fire: “Go, before a heart attack happen to me.” The asking price is $545,000.
But something always rescues us from the doldrums. At one point a father and son flag us down and hungrily approach, with dad wrapping his arms around the kid as they stare wide-eyed at all their options.
Father: “Pick me out something good.”
Son: “Pick the Mario.”
Father: “Uhh … pick me something without a face.”
Mahmoud and the dad then exchange greetings in Arabic, chatting briefly before we drive away. The mood in the truck has brightened immensely.
Our Ice Cream Man has slightly odd but very sincere ideas about religion. Essentially, he holds Christian, Jewish, and Muslim beliefs simultaneously. It’s all holy to him. And everything about his life — from how much ice cream he sold today to whether he’ll even wake up tomorrow — has been predetermined by God to serve the greatest possible good. Mahmoud has his health, his family, his steady job. Which is why he can weather such crappy weather and still spend an hour’s worth of sales on a bag of Bing cherries from a roadside stand.
Plus, there’s always heaven. Mahmoud tells the story of a Christian woman who showed him a book of pictures supposedly representing the afterlife: People lazing about eating apples and smiling and prancing around with animals and whatnot. The woman laughed when Mahmoud asked if maybe he could sell ice cream there.
As for his own personal image of the hereafter: Basically, you can eat whatever you like, you can get married, and everyone’s 33 years old (“good age, not old, not young, and everybody the same size”).
For a while we listen to chants from the Koran on cassette, with Mahmoud explaining the plots and ideas until he sheepishly ejects the tape and admits that he can’t translate perfectly, so he doesn’t want to mistakenly give us the wrong impression. He likes listening to the tape, though, sometimes while rolling over the San Mateo Bridge, driving slowly so the wind doesn’t blow him into the bay.
He talks about religion constantly throughout the day, which finally ends at an In-N-Out Burger after about six hours, a rather short shift by his standards. He’s made maybe $40 — coulda been $80 if he’d timed the school thing right. But he merrily rolls back into Hayward and sends us off with a giant Neapolitan Ice Cream Bar — Christianity the vanilla, Islam the chocolate, Judaism the strawberry. It’s not a giant lime sherbet ice cream foot with the gumball embedded in the big toe, but if it’s good enough for Mahmoud Rabah, it’s good enough for us.
