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by Ellen—Age 47—Brooklyn, NY
Once upon a time in New York there were street vendors who sold egg creams. I worked for a man named Jasper who dropped his workers and their carts in a central location in Manhattan and then we would have to push these carts, loaded down with tanks of seltzer and gallons of milk and chocolate syrup, to our own special street corner. As New Yorkers know, egg creams are made without eggs and without cream and only with Fox’s U-Bet syrup. They were beyond heavy. I always got stuck in in the street where the asphalt had worn through to the old cobblestones and the businessmen would never stop and help me get loose. Being new to the streets, the egg cream sellers were looked on with hostility by the other vendors who had already staked their claims. The cops would walk up to you for no reason and say, “You have to move. Exigent circumstances.”
Jasper was a maniac. He drove around all day in his truck hoping to catch sight of one of us actually sitting on the job, though this was difficult to do since we were usually serving people and there really wasn’t anywhere to sit. Sometimes due to exhaustion you would prop yourself up against a fire hydrant and then you’d hear Jasper shrieking across traffic to get up or he’d turn your cart over. If he thought you didn’t earn enough money at the end of the day he would yell at you, holler that you should be hawking the egg creams at the top of your lungs. Jasper’s truck would slink quietly up to the curb behind your back and he would yell down at you, “I can’t hear you!”
Egg creams were 75 cents and we made a quarter on each one. We gave out rod pretzels for free with a sale. People were always asking if they could just get a free pretzel. The other three most common questions were, “Where is Wall Street?” (usually while I was standing on Wall Street), “Where’s the egg?,” and “Whaddya, drinking up all the profits?” if I drank a cup of seltzer. Sometimes I had to make an egg cream in the space of time it took for a red light to change to green and run it over to a cabbie or a truck driver.
One day I was working in front of Bloomingdale’s when a scruffy, smiling man approached me and confided that he had a very large knife with which he planned to first kill me and then everyone in Bloomingdale’s. I thought this unlikely but still called Jasper, instead of the police. After 20 minutes I noticed two young men wearing gym shorts walking back and forth, glancing sideways out of their eyes. Finally, just like in the movies, they yelled, “Police! Freeze!” and pinned the crazy man against the front window of Bloomingdale’s with his hands behind his back. A very large knife fell down the inside of his pants and onto the sidewalk.
I can still make an excellent egg cream.
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