Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut

by Rob Sheffield

  I see the ice cream man on my block, and he makes the kids wait in line. You know what that means? That’s right, you heard me—it means he doesn’t respect the ice cream. It also means he probably sells the drugs.

  Like playing a stupid jingle—you betray the whole experience when you make people stand in line. The kids want to crowd around the ice cream truck and look inside, ogle all the flavors and freezers, like boozers standing at the bar. Nobody wants to be put on the spot, forced to make up their mind fast like they’re standing at the free-throw line. Of course, people want to feel like they’re waiting their turn, without others cutting in line ahead of them, but a real ice cream man knows how to reassure the customers that he remembers whose turn is when. You’re here to make people relax, enjoy the presence of the truck, not make it a stressful experience. You’re here to respect the ice cream. Can’t sell it without insulting it? Fine. Somebody else will, buddy.

  This was the best job I ever had, even if it meant putting up with little kids all day. I learned a lot about crowd control. Sno-Cones were the toughest. You have to open them for the kid, because they’re basically a fat chunk of ice in a plastic bag. Two out of three Sno-Cones get dumped on the ground while the kid is trying to rip them open. I think they must design them that way on purpose. So when you give a kid a Sno-Cone, you better have a back-up handy. After the first Sno-Cone hits the dirt, you have to hustle the new one into their hands pronto. You have a two- or three-second window.

  They never cry right away. They always stare at the ground in shock, then fast-forward through denial, anger, depression and acceptance before they start to wail. This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to them. That Sno-Cone on the sidewalk is the end of innocence, the first lesson that the world is out to nail them, and you do not want to be there when this happens.

  The kid is crushed. The other kids stare at you in Sno-Conenfreude. The parents are pissed. You have to get the new Sno-Cone into their mitts before they start crying, or it’s too late.

  Everybody was always glad to see me. Who doesn’t love the ice cream man? The kids turned out to be plenty of fun. They were, in a manner of speaking, my kids. I kept them cool. By the end of June, the shorties on the route knew when to show up. They knew to stay on the sidewalk until the truck stopped, because they knew an ice cream man puts child safety first. They knew not to ask the ice cream man annoying questions like “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Hey ice cream man, how much money do they pay you?”

  “Simmer down, you rascals. I don’t do this for money. I do it for the love of ice cream.”

  “Do you sleep in the truck?”

  “Do you got a bathroom in the truck?”

  “You got any Lotsa Fizz?”

  “Yes, my young whippersnapper with the arcane taste. I ordered some just for you.”

  “Hey ice cream man, do you got a girlfriend?”

  “Right bitches. Who wants a Bomb Pop?”

  Nobody wanted a Bomb Pop. They were easily the most worthless crap in the truck. Red, white and blue lacrosse sticks made of ice, completely flavorless, barely worth the room they took up in the freezer. I priced them at a dime, in case any absolute bottom feeders wanted the cheapest item I had, but really, you’d be better off sucking on the dime. Moreover, Bomb Pops were possessed of dubious patriotic overtones.

  “Hey, Randy, I’m not sure about these Bomb Pops.”

  “Kids love the Bomb Pops. What are you talking about? Need a fresh case?”

  “Dude, it’s gonna take me all summer to unload the ones you already sold me.”

  “There’s no such thing as bad ice cream. Only a bad ice cream man.”

  “It isn’t really even ice cream, though. More like ice. Besides, don’t you think the name is a bit obnoxious?”

  “What? It’s a bomb of ice cream. Ka-boom! ”

  “I don’t know, dude. As a draft-age male, I wonder if you’ve considered the nausea that the words ‘bomb pop’evoke in your late-adolescent customers. Don’t you think the threat of thermonuclear war vitiates the innocent pleasures of summer refreshments?”

  “Ah, get out of here, kid. It’s always been called the Bomb Pop, and it always will be. Red, white and blue.”

  Randy was proud of the Bomb Pop name. He had a framed letter on his office wall from Congressman Ed Markey, who used to drive for the Universal Ice Cream Company to work his way through law school. The letter jovially suggested they change “Bomb Pop” to something less morbid, like the “Nuclear Freeze.” Randy wouldn’t budge.

  “Fine. Maybe I’ll sell one to Caspar Weinberger.”

  “Cheer up, kid. Hey, did I tell you about the Greek tampon? It’s called ‘Abzorba the Leak.’ ”

  I had push-ups, which would have intrigued me more if I’d known that push-up bras even existed, but unfortunately my knowledge of women’s underwear was a little rudimentary at the time. I had chocolate eclairs, Snickers bars, cans of soda that only cost me a dime apiece, which meant they were practically free, and the good old ice cream sandwich, which only cost me a nickel. There was hardly anything I sold that I didn’t eat in any imaginable combination. I was self-employed, so I could pull over any time I wanted and gorge my face full of frosty atrocities. I would roll over to my parents’ house for lunch and ply my sisters with goodies. All I asked my sisters in return was that they say, “You are wise and generous, oh ice cream man.”

  I kept my Walkman on the dashboard, plugged into a couple of speakers from Bradlee’s. I played the radio, which was full of great shit that summer. It was a historic summer for Top 40 radio, as anyone who lived through it will tell you. The country was in terrible shape, nuclear war was just around the corner, movies sucked, TV sucked and the Red Sox had just traded Dennis Eckersley for Bill Buckner—but pop was on a roll, and the most advanced music being created anywhere in the world was right there crackling out of my cheapshit speakers.

  I was eighteen, and I liked both kinds of music: Echo and the Bunnymen. But Top 40 was so rich that every damn station on the dial was playing something incredible. I loved to crank up the volume in the Callahan Tunnel, where you can literally hear the music bounce off the walls. When you have Prince on the radio, all the ice cream you can gobble in the freezer and nothing to do but drive a truck in Boston traffic without a single lesson on how, being eighteen is pretty close to bearable.

  I lived on ice cream sandwiches and Top 40 hits all summer, dodging traffic on the Southeast Expressway singing along to an endless loop of “Purple Rain” and “99 Luftballons” and “Roxanne Roxanne” and “Ghostbusters” and “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and “Missing You.” I heard Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” so many times a day, I translated it into Spanish just for sheer psychic self-preservation. (“¡No haces fuego! ¡No haces in fuego en la soledad! ¡Estoy bailando, bailando por la oscuridad!”) And every time Prince strummed that cathedral-sized opening guitar chord of “Purple Rain,” it felt like the ice cream truck was a spaceship lifting off to bring Creamsicles to distant constellations—even when I was stuck in traffic on Storrow Drive.

  My favorite kids were at the corner of Highland and Herman in Dorchester, where I’d arrive around nine. Stacey, Manny and Pepito would breakdance for free ice cream, singing songs like “Centipede” and “Cool It Now.” I would park, eat my dinner of La Dips and Orange Crush, and reflect on a day’s work well done, giving these kids whatever I felt like getting rid of. Then they would make me hide behind the door and make painful noises, so they could throw rocks at the dragon and make him roar.

  “Hey ice cream man, the dragon is in pain!”

  “That dragon is hurting!”

  “Die, dragon!”

  “Hey, ice cream man, you got a girlfriend?”

  The kids at High Point Village in West Roxbury were special because they were allowed to sass the ice cream man. This was a privilege rarely extended. They called me “R.E.M.,” because that was the music they heard coming out of
my truck one afternoon. They thought it was incredibly funny to meet a guy who actually listened to R.E.M., and they did mean imitations of the singer Michael Stipe in the video, clutching earphones and wailing, “I’m soooorryyyyy! I’m soooorryyyyy!”

  “Hey, R.E.M., do you live in the truck?”

  “Do you got a girl in the truck?”

  “A naked girl?”

  “Hey, R.E.M., do you sell any dimebags, man?”

  “Gimme something free, R.E.M.!”

  Nobody else was allowed to sass me.

  I would sell to girls around town I had crushes on, girls whose communions at St. Mary’s I had gazed upon as an altar boy, now girls who bought ice cream from me. It would have been nice if any of these girls had noticed me. It would have been even nicer if they’d said, “Excuse me, Mr. Ice Cream Eye Candy, but I’m having trouble getting my tongue warmed up—could you spare a girl some practice licks? I don’t know, I guess I’m feeling a little . . . fros-tay!”

  This never happened.

  On weekends, I parked by the Public Garden, or near the Boston Tea Party Ship. I sat in the truck and read Kafka’s The Trial or some depressive shit like that, waiting for tourists. I snickered at English people for calling popsicles “ice lollies.” On the Fourth of July, my friend Barak and I parked the truck by the Esplanade for the Boston Pops concert and made an absolute killing. On the way home, traffic was backed up so far that people were getting out of their cars to come buy something, or passing bills from car to car. By the end of the night, we were tossing free ice cream cones out the window, since we’d bought more than we could store in the freezer. God bless America. (Nobody bought any Bomb Pops, however.)

  To tell the truth, I was a little bit drunk on my new popularity. Nobody wanted to antagonize the ice cream man, because they knew I would never stop on their street again. So I was treated like a visiting king. It’s fair to say I lost perspective. I began referring to myself in the third person, even when I was mumbling to myself in the truck, saying things like “The ice cream man will now stop for lunch,” or “The ice cream man could use another Hoodsie.” Even driving my crappy old Chevy Nova home, I would announce, “The ice cream man is signaling to switch to the left lane. Stand back lest ye melt!” My sisters began grumbling and calling me Snow Miser.

  It was the closest I’d ever come to being a star, the kind that Prince was in Purple Rain, riding that motorcyle around with Apollonia on the back, cruising Lake Minnetonka, suffering the hard work of being so beautiful that people bombard you with attention day and night. I was already a big fan, but watching Purple Rain, I thought, this is my life. Finally, someone else gets it. I felt like Prince could understand what I was going through. We’d have to hang out some time. He could play me some tasty new tracks, and maybe I could serve him a Hoodsie.

  PAUL MCCARTNEY

  “No More Lonely Nights ”

  1984

  It was Paul McCartney who warped my young brain with the idea that not worshipping a girl was a waste of time, an idea that has caused about 88 percent of the misery in my life. (The other 12 percent was caused by “Say Say Say.”)

  Paul McCartney is one of the central mysteries of my universe. He’s the only Beatle people really argue about. The other three, for better or worse, are fixed in their roles—John as the caustic rebel, George as the religious one, Ringo as the drummer. But Paul is the loose cannon, the danger Beatle, the X in the fab equation. He’s the only one you can mention in a bar to start an argument. Nobody really knows what to do with Paul, which is why I think about him all the time.

  Paul was the bitchiest Beatle. Everybody knows the other Beatles thought he was bossy. Even in the interviews for the 1990s Anthology documentaries, George Harrison physically bristles in his company. But he was the Beatle who worked hardest, who forced the others to finish their songs and show up to the studio.

  Paul is the bossy Irish sister in the Beatles. Every Irish family has one of these, and it’s always the oldest girl. My cousin Graine in Dublin explained to me that this sister is called “the Alsatian,” which is the British Isles term for the breed of dog that Americans call a Doberman. “I’m the Alsatian in my family,” she explained at one family dinner. We were standing against a wall watching our cousins congregate from all over Ireland, noting the uncanny pattern—every family seemed to have a gang of sisters. “Yes, but there’s only one of us per family,” she told me. “The Alsatian—the enforcer. I’m the one who stirs the pot and speaks my mind. I’m the Alsatian in my family. Ann is the Alsatian in yours.”

  Any Irish brother can recognize what Paul was doing in the Beatles. He was the Alsatian. He kept coming up with more work for them to do, dreaming up big, daft ideas, sometimes brilliant (Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road), sometimes involving walrus costumes (Magical Mystery Tour). He got mad if he didn’t think they were pushing hard enough. It always cracks me up that some people describe “Getting Better” as a cheerful, optimistic song. Nagging the other Beatles about how things could be better, a little better, all the fucking time—that sounds like Paul to me.

  Paul was the girliest Beatle, the prettiest star with the long eyelashes. He was one of the original rock-and-roll gender-benders, which is why he was the most new-wave Beatle. But if his prettiness helped create the Beatles, it was his bitchiness that kept them alive, and it isn’t much of an exaggeration to say that the Beatles were his fantasy—every time the others were burned out and felt like trying something different, not being Beatles anymore, it was Paul who would herd them back into the group. John dismissed his tunes as “granny music.” Exactly—I bet Paul’s granny was one tough Irish broad who could beat up any bartender in Liverpool. And I also bet she had some terrified brothers.

  That’s why he still bugs people. His image might be the pop softie, the crowd-pleaser who plays nice for the old ladies, the one who plays it safe. But paradoxically, he’s the only Beatle that people despise. Beatles histories tend to agree about everything except the Paul Question, which is where they get contentious. Countless bands have styled themselves in opposition to the Beatles, as the “bad boys” of rock: the Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Sex Pistols, etc. These bands set out to piss people off. But there’s no way they could possibly piss people off the way Paul does.

  Paul’s girl worship will always be the most disturbing and mysterious thing about him. It is strange, no matter how you look at it, that he likes them so much, considering the time and place when he became a rock star. He waltzed into a life where, by the time he was twenty-two, he knew for a fact that no whim would ever be refused him, whether it was sex, drugs, cars, gurus or druids. (Football teams—I think lots of English rock stars buy those.) Paul chose to be a husband. In nearly thirty years together, he and Linda famously never spent a night apart, except when he was in jail for smuggling weed into Tokyo.

  The Stones suggested that if you dabble in decadence, you could turn into a devil-worshipping junkie. Paul McCartney suggested that if you mess around with girl worship, you could turn into a husband. So Paul was a lot scarier.

  He didn’t just sing about the way love messes up your mind—he lived it out. He even let his wife, Linda, join the band. Everybody made fun of him for that; everybody knew the joke, “What do you call a dog with wings?” There’s no way Paul didn’t know the whole world was laughing at him for giving his wife so much of his attention—he just didn’t care. Or maybe he did it to annoy people. (And it is both weird and impossible not to notice that all four Beatles had absurdly long-lived marriages, second marriages in most of their cases—did any other major rock band spawn such notoriously doting husbands?)

  Paul has been called many things—sappy, sentimental, complacent, a pothead, a mama’s boy, dead, the Walrus. But never a misogynist, which definitely makes him stand out from the other rock stars of his generation. As early as 1968, the first biographer to write a book about the Beatles, Hunter Davies, noted that Paul was the one with “modern” attitudes about women. (He compared s
ome of the others to Andy Capp.) Even before he married Linda, he was squiring the actress Jane Asher, making him one of very few ’60s rock stars whose choice of female companion was another creative artist. He was always vocal in giving her credit for helping to introduce him to things like classical music and modern art, the things that influenced Beatles albums like Sgt. Pepper and Revolver. And he fawned over his wife, so he spent the Boogie Nights era on an organic farm in Scotland, raising four kids and eating her steamed wheatgrass casseroles.

  In his music, even from his earliest days, Paul liked girls so much that he sounded phony when he tried to be mean. The only time he ever sang an “it ain’t me babe” song, he came up with “Another Girl,” which is laughably insincere. And even then he disses one chick because he met another who “will always be my friend.” He became insanely famous by singing about how he liked girls, but once he got famous, he just seemed to go right on liking them.

  You have to admit, there aren’t many stories like Paul McCartney’s in the annals of rock and roll, or showbiz in general. This was the most ardently desired male on earth, not to mention one of Britain’s top earners. Most of us would not have made the sexual choices he made, given his options. I have no idea how he treated his groupies in the ’60s—although maybe it has to signify something that none of them ever sold him out to the tabloids. But if it was ever a pain in the ass to be married to Linda, who by all accounts was as tough-minded and stubborn as he was, the world never heard about it. And when John and Yoko split up in the early 1970s, guess who Yoko sent to L.A. to go talk to John?